Transcript of the above video: 

In the last week or so, Bangkok Post published an article I found. It is titled: Understanding Thailand's 40 Reserved occupations exclusively for Thai nationals. I thought it was interesting, it just popped up while I was searching through the Bangkok Post, just kind of looking around. We have this new government, I am thinking we are probably going to revert to sort of standard paradigms on Immigration here in Thailand where we have kind of been through this weird period of fluctuation and how they view immigration matters especially under the past government, especially where Ministry of Foreign Affairs sort of invented their own Visa category and it really wasn't fit to purpose for use inside Thailand. That said, the restricted occupations remain what they are. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Understanding Thailand's 40 Reserved Occupations exclusively for Thai nationals. Quoting directly: "Although Thailand is relatively open in allowing foreigners to work through legal work visas, the law still restricts certain occupations exclusively for Thai National. Foreigners who do not receive specific exemptions are prohibited from engaging in these professions or roles." And in these instances, there is not a specific exemption under many of these circumstances, but specifically foreign lawyers and agents. In the title we made it “Visa Agent’s mostly because a lot of what we talk about on this channel pertains to Visas and Immigration but actually what it says, and I'll go ahead and quote directly. What we used for the thumbnail has this falling under 19 For Thai Hands Only. Below is a list of 25+ occupations that are strictly prohibited for foreigners: Under 19 it says Brokerage or Agency Work, and then over in the actual body of the article, it says, Brokerage or Agency work, except for international trade or investment. 

So, again, first of all understand those are the specific exemptions: International trade or investment and the reason for bringing up agent specifically is there are a lot of people that call themselves Visa Agents in Thailand, foreigners especially, who are completely operating outside the law, as is clearly stated right here. Again, in Bangkok Post. Now I have already done a number of videos on this and I have shown the specific Ministerial Decrees to this effect in prior videos, and all of these remain in force, so that's still there. But there are other kinds of agents; there are people that call themselves all kinds of different agents especially in different professional capacities who are also illegal in Thailand. So it's not just Visa agents, but for the purpose of the title I felt it was worth sort of drilling down on that because there are a number of those folks. 

Meanwhile over here another specifically reserved restricted occupation to Thais only, Legal services and proceedings except for the following occupations: Performing duties of arbitration. If you actually go to the Ministerial Decree and when they talk about arbitration, they are talking about specific foreign legal, so it's where like the law of a foreign jurisdiction may come into play, you could have a foreigner involved in arbitration in a legal capacity. Barring that, they are prohibited from being involved in anything involving legal work. 

Then meanwhile, if you go back here in what we used for the thumbnail, under 26: Clerical or Secretarial Work. So you'll see a lot of foreigners try to like carve out "oh well it's not legal work, it's something else. But clerical and secretarial, between legal, clerical and secretarial, anything that would occur in a law firm or professional legal services firm, would be covered by that and so foreigners are therefore prohibited from operating in those areas. 

So it's important to point this out, and I know I'll get burned in the comments and things - I'm kind of used to that - but it's important to point this out because every day almost it seems like, I deal with somebody in a consulting capacity or somebody will be talking to us in the firm that will have dealt with one of these foreigners, frankly illegal foreigners, in the past and they got themselves embroiled in something that is frankly not to their benefit and they end up in a situation where they are detrimentally impacted by these foreigners operating illegally in Thailand. And it's not something that we like to see here, and frankly I think it has a negative impact on Brand Thailand because oftentimes those same illegal foreigners will blame the Thais; they will say, "oh it's just the Thais and their silly legal system" or "their legal system is just geared against the foreigners" or something. No, most of the time it is these illegal foreigners getting these people into bad situations they shouldn't have been in in the first place. 

So the thing to ascertain and understand with dealing with any professional here in Thailand, especially in a legal capacity, or somebody acting as some kind of an agent is ascertaining whether or not they are in fact a Thai national because if they are not, they are operating illegally here in the Kingdom of Thailand.