Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not Immigration is “amazing”, and it appears that there have been some tourists over this past holiday who have been less than thrilled with Thai Immigration. Let's just jump in here.

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Thai Immigration rebuffs viral complaints. Quoting directly: "The Immigration Bureau (IB) has dismissed viral complaints about crippling queues at Suvarnabhumi Airport, saying officers clear passengers within 30 minutes, even during peak holiday traffic. The saga stems from a social media post by a Japanese tourist" - I think it's important to point out this is a Japanese tourist which among the sort of subset if you will of foreigners who come to Thailand, the Japanese are about the most patient and about the most polite when it comes to about anything going on here. So I think that's worth pointing out. Quoting again: "social media post by a Japanese tourist who complained about long queues of tourists at Immigration counters in the Arrival Hall, with a sarcastic caption describing the experience as Amazing." Yeah, there's one of my WIN guys, motorbike drivers here nearby the studio here, I have known him for almost as long as I have been here I think, and he always, when we get stuck in terrible traffic or something, it's one of the few instances - sarcasm is not, cynicism for that matter, it's one of the things I like about Thailand, but sarcasm is not abundant here - but every now and again we will be stuck in traffic somewhere and he'll kind of quietly - or sometimes not so quietly - say, "Oh Amazing Thailand" and it's basically sort of a sarcastic play on a prior promotional ad campaign for Thailand called Amazing Thailand; seems to be what's going on here. That said, quoting further: "The post has sparked widespread criticism of airport Immigration services. A handful of Japanese netizens shared similar experiences in the comments and advised travellers to allow at least two hours to clear Immigration during the peak holiday period. Pol. Col. Pongthorn Pongratchatanan, Deputy Commander and spokesman of Immigration Division 2, yesterday said the incident occurred on Sunday, one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Between 1 pm and 2 pm alone, as many as 30 international flights arrived, bringing approximately 5,700 passengers." 

Now by any metric, that's a significant number of people. Quoting further: "From 10 am to 5 pm, inbound passenger numbers fell below 4,000 per hour with more than 85,000 passengers passing through Suvarnabhumi Airport over the day." 85,000! I mean, again I'm not trying to exactly be any kind of an apologist or anything for Immigration. If it's delayed and things were not efficient, then there needs to be some accountability there. But I have got to be honest with you, 85,000 passengers in one day, from 1- 2 pm there were 5,700 passengers and okay it went to below 4,000, so somewhere between 3 and 4,000 per hour otherwise. Again some credit where credit is due; just processing that number of people is substantial.

That said, quoting further: "He said IB (that's the Immigration Bureau) deployed Officers at full strength, suspending leave to speed up passenger processing while maintaining strict national security screening standards." - I'll get back to that in a moment - "He added that long Immigration queues are common worldwide during seasons." Fair enough, and I think it's fair to note, Thailand has been a war for the better part of the last half of this last year. Yes, the ceasefire is holding. Yes, it looks like things are starting to cool down again, but as I discussed and as noted there, “maintaining strict national security screening”. Look, there has been a paradigm shift within Thai Immigration. It's not going to be the same sort of thinking with regard to this stuff as has been the case in other instances in the past. As I've discussed, we saw a major paradigm shift occurring from about 2009 going through to about 2012 where it went from being kind of generally thought of as an Administrative function to kind of more of a Law Enforcement thing, and then with the rise of "Big Joke", Surachate "Big Joke" Hakparn to the top of the Immigration Bureau, we saw a massive paradigm shift into a Law Enforcement kind of thinking. As discussed last year in a rather recent video within the fourth quarter of 2025, I made a video where I was discussing the fact that look, with everything that has happened at the border, we have now seen a paradigm shift toward "National Security" with regard to Immigration and there's just overall a different way of thinking about how all of this works. 

Now what does that mean as a practical matter? Well I'm not actually surprised that we saw these levels of queues, these levels of lines at the airport, because high volume travel, coupled with much more scrutiny stemming from a shifted paradigm to a National Security posture, from the Establishment here in Thailand, I'm really not surprised we saw a lot of slow processing. That being said, you would think with the technology and things, and this isn't an excuse for more Orwellian nonsense, but we do have the tech now to really move this stuff along. One would think it could be done somewhat more quickly. 

That being said, I'm sorry, look 8,500 passengers going through Suvarnabhumi in a day, at a clip of at best less than 4,000 an hour, it's going to take some time. Now that being said, again I think that efficiency, we should always look to improve it, but it's not like this was apropos of nothing. As usual, I urge those folks who are watching this video, check out this article in detail. They actually go into some rather good information, insight into how this is all working, but yeah again, I think it's really pertinent to point out there has been a major policy shift with regard to Immigration here in the Kingdom of Thailand.