Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question is Thai Immigration going overboard. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: British Manager of Pattaya Soi 6 bar arrested for human trafficking. Now the excerpt we are going to quote from this article does not go to the thrust of this article really much at all. I don't exactly know what is going on precisely in the body in the rest of this article and so I urge those who are watching this video, yes of course go check out that article for yourself. I am not going to comment on the rest of the body of the article because it looks very nebulous. I can't ascertain what is going on there so I am going to just leave it without comment but the title being what it is, pattayamail.com. I am going to quote this small excerpt though because I thought this was interesting, quoting directly: "Pattaya had shut down bars on Walking Street and detained tourists, checking their passports and visas for overstayers. The move contrasted starkly with the Coronavirus pandemic when authorities did everything they could to make foreigners feel welcome." Well one, I think that it is a bit of a misnomer. I mean the whole country was locked down; foreigners feel welcome, okay! Then you had the Phuket Sandbox which yes I kind of euphemistically referred to that as Devil's Island because once you got on to it you couldn't get off for a certain period of time. Now all joking aside, it wasn't that bad but I would not say that anything was conducive to tourists during the lockdowns, far from it. Now in the immediate aftermath of it, and really over the past 9 months or so, yes I think Authorities and everybody in the tourism sector realized that yes we needed to make some changes and we needed to get the tourists back. Now were they putting up the sort of checkpoints to check for overstays anywhere? No, because quite frankly there wasn't anybody here. I mean they weren't a large number of foreigners in Thailand. There weren't any tourists in Thailand.

The question sort of posed by this video is again 'checking passports and visas sort of on the street,' you will hear about this from time to time. It seems to be kind of a rare set of incidences where this will happen, you will hear of, "Oh there is Immigration Police checking people's passports." Now inspections in offices, we have seen that frequently. That just will happen from time to time, either the Department of Employment under the Department of Labour or the Immigration Bureau itself will oftentimes conduct inspections of various business premises in order to ascertain whether or not those on the premises have proper documentation, if they are in lawful status and they have work authorization. However, it is pretty darn rare to hear about just sort of street checkpoints. They happen with a lot of rarity. 

I cited this because I found it a little bit concerning and I am hoping this doesn't become a major trend because I don't think it is very good for tourism and quite honestly I think it is unlikely that that will happen. Immigration Police have better things to do oftentimes than just set up random checkpoints and just start basically checking anybody with blue eyes or somebody that doesn't look like a Thai for their Immigration status. It is just not something they are going to do on the day to day.  But in certain instances where they feel or it seems where they feel like it is warranted, yeah they can do roundups as we discussed in the crackdowns involving “Big Joke” some years ago. Yeah they took a heavy enforcement stance and really went out and started enforcing Thai Immigration Law. Meanwhile, another thing to bear in mind is we have sort of come out of the high season now and I think there is kind of an internal mentality within Thai Immigration that folks that are here in the high season, there is sort of a presumption of tourist intent if you will. Then after you get out of high season where we are over here now in April, which is pretty darn hot here in Thailand I am here to tell you right now, I can't wait for Thai New Year to get going where people can start, well for a day I enjoy being splashed with water. Over the course of about 5 days it becomes a little bit too much but it is nice for the cool down is what I am trying to say. Then you get over into sort of the early summer into the midsummer and yeah Immigration is probably wanting to know what people are doing sort of “okay you came here in January and now you are hanging out in Thailand still in June what are you doing?” I think that there is a presumption that at that point as we have discussed in other videos, you are kind of becoming like what we would call in the American context an intending Immigrant without documentation. I think that presumption starts to arise more and more as you get further into the so-called low season. This is just my personal speculation but it is based on years of experience just kind of watching how Immigration operates, I just think that is their paradigm. 

So again a lot going on here. I urge folks who are watching this video go check out that article because again it is very nebulous. I don't fully understand what is going on there and I am hoping Pattaya Mail will keep us updated as to that but I found it interesting this one little excerpt about checking people for overstay. Yeah it does occasionally happen. Does it happen very often? No not really. If you are a tourist and you really are a tourist, you really don't have a lot to worry about but if you are somebody that has come here ostensibly as a tourist and you are not actually a tourist, you probably want to get into a more regularized status so as to stay here long term legally and avoid having issues with something like a checkpoint that comes up checking for overstayers.