Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing cancellation of 10,000 visas here in Thailand what are we talking about? Let's jump in. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Bureau cancels 10,000 temporary stay permits. Quoting directly: "The Immigration Bureau has revoked temporary stay permits for nearly 10,000 foreign nationals whose Visa status failed to comply with the regulations, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation" - boy that's a long acronym - "(MHESI) said." Quoting further: "The move is part of ongoing efforts to prevent the misuse of Student Visas by foreign nationals seeking to work illegally in the Kingdom. This aims to prevent the misuse of Student Visas by foreign nationals seeking to work here and lawfully. Institutes of higher education must establish internal procedures for monitoring the attendance of international students and submit monthly progress reports through the MHESI's centralized international student tracking system."

So there is a database for tracking all of this, and they are now monitoring the attendance of folks going to these international programs. Look, I am not thrilled overly about all of this. As we see the increasing digitization being rolled out, we are seeing increasingly Orwellian and, in many cases, Kafkaesque outcomes where people are just monitored tracked and traced all the time. That said, these are foreign nationals in Thailand, and as I have discussed in many other videos going back all the way into the Surachate "Big Joke" Hakparn administration out at Thai Immigration, and even before that, Education Visas have always been looked upon askance by the Immigration Bureau because there have been many, many instances over the years of basically outright immigration fraud being perpetrated by what one can describe as "Visa mills" - one example is there were Thai language schools for years out here that weren't really quite teaching as many people as had visas at their facility, and there was a major crackdown; I did reports on it at the time from “Big Joke” who was cracking down on folks that were ostensibly students and they actually would roll out basically the Paddy Wagon for lack of a better term, they would basically take one of their truck facilities and go down to some of these schools and just round people up that they thought were here illicitly, put them in the vans and just get them out of here; deport them summarily. 

So this isn't anything exactly new. There's a through line of this theme over the years here in Thailand. But that said, cancellation of 10,000 visas, that is significant news that will have a tremendous effect on the expat community here in Thailand. Exactly how this plays out remains to be seen. We will certainly be keeping you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.