Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing further issues associated with the Digital Arrival Card and just sort of Immigration in general. I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel, quoting directly, and in that video that I got the comment on, we were talking about how the digitization of the Immigration System here in Thailand is putting people off; people don't want to deal with all this hassle when they just want to come to the beach, or go on vacation, spend extra time in Thailand, being here, spending money. 

Quoting directly: "Have problems getting in. Ended up going back to KL for an E-visa.  They have all the info of flights in and out, how many days and still have to go get the 30 days extension. Also the paperwork doesn't make sense anymore. There's no TM6 and nowhere to put the E-Visa number." Yeah, I mean that's the other thing I have noticed, especially US Immigration I first started noticing this, and now it's right around the world and anytime you are dealing with Thai Immigration now, if you are dealing with Vietnamese in a foreign country, now you have got to do a Visa Run or a Border Run to a foreign country because you can't easily convert status in country now. So you have got to go over to Cambodia or Laos or wherever: Vietnam, Malaysia, and then they want to see information about your trip there and then they want interaction between the E-Visa system and the Thailand Digital Arrival Card System. It's not great. Quoting further: "The TDAC and the E-Visa extension sites also make very little sense. Yes, it is a hassle. Not like the old days where you just zip out in the back and they actually wanted people here. It just seems as though Immigration has gotten really mean since COVID finished -and I was here for all of that.” Yeah look, COVID was a watershed in a sense, or a turning point, however you want to look at it. I don't mean to mix metaphors, but nothing has gotten okay, yeah during COVID it was terrible. We had to basically learn an entirely new body of Immigration Law to deal with Thailand. In certain ways the US Immigration System was sort of turned on his head. I mean I had a backlog for a whole year where I think 3 cases moved out of the Embassy and those were ones that had gotten from NVC before all this went down. 

Meanwhile, you look back at it, it's like why? Why couldn't cases move through the system because of COVID? What? Do computers get COVID? I mean it was just nonsense and I have to wonder, if the people who were working at the embassy at the time just got a big holiday because, and I don't usually like to point fingers or cast aspersions at those folks, they do a good job most of the time, and they are working, I get it, but it was like COVID just shut everything down for no real reason we now know. It was all largely a bunch of hullabaloo and then okay, it has gotten better since then, but that's like saying, "hey I was in jail. Now I'm on probation. This is better." I mean well yeah, but you're still not back to where you were and that is kind of where we are at with the Thai Immigration System. It's cumbersome in many ways; it's unnecessarily Byzantine now in a digital sense. There were other comments on that same video that said some of the Immigration Officers didn't even care if you had your Digital Arrival Card, they didn't even want to see it. I mean I question the rationale behind all of this.

I mean I have done the videos already. PIBICS, (p-i-b-i-c-s is an acronym), I can't exactly remember what it's for, but it's basically the Immigration Bureau's sort of Crow’s Nest that sits at Suvarnabhumi Airport that acts as a kind of a what we would call a Fusion Center in the sort of Department Homeland Security vernacular back in the United States, that gets all of this information and is able to instantly collate it.  Then you have got APPS, the Advanced Passenger Processing System here in Thailand that can tell when somebody, before they even board the plane, can tell from the passenger manifest if somebody has a major criminal issue and they won't let them on the plane. What's the point of all of this extra digital gobbledegook for people that just want to come here and spend money? I do understand phasing out the TM6. It was paper cards, it cost money; there was probably a savings. But as I discussed previously, the TM30 itself handles address reporting for folks that are going to live here. As for folks that just come in and do 30, 60 or 90 days, is it really super important to have this digital thing that apparently even immigration itself doesn't really need or want. I question the need for all of this.