Transcript of the above video: 

Yet again we are talking about the DTV, and no I do not have some grudge against the DTV; I know there are a lot of people that think I do. Look, I've been doing this a long time. I have been doing these video for 8 years now. I remember going back talking about the, it used to be called the Income Affidavit at American and British Embassies for Retirement Visa Extensions. I remember talking about it about two weeks before those ultimately came to an end discussing the ending of them and everybody burned me and said I was terrible and fear-mongering and trying to make money for myself by fear-mongering etc., etc. No my concerns here are the fact that this has been oversold in a PR blitz and the actual ramifications of this Visa are not precisely what they appear to be; that's what is concerning to me. It's not this notion that "oh he doesn't like it because people can come here to live." No, the problem I have got with it is there's a lot of what is in my opinion optimistic information or overly optimistic information or just flat incorrect information about how the Immigration System works, how it interacts with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, how visas get issued, how they are maintained and I think a lot of people who think this Visa is going to work a certain way, are going to find that practically it doesn't quite work the way it was at least initially bandied about. One of the big examples of this I think is the issue of extension of these visas in-country. Let me get into this.

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Thailand's DTV game changer: let sleeping dogs lie for now. Quoting directly: "DTV holders receive 180 days on entry and there is no restriction on the repeat number of visit by sea, land or air." So what does that mean? It means the 180 days; you can come and go in that period and you're still sort of in that initial 180 days. That's what we are talking about there. That said, quoting further: "It is after all a 5-year multi-entry Visa as stressed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Naruchai Ninnad in his famous "deeper dive" interview with the Bangkok Post." Well neato, except for the fact that that guy is not in charge of Interior or Immigration, so why is he talking about it as if things at Interior or Immigration are going to be a foregone conclusion? They're not within his bailiwick. The comments on it are irrelevant when it comes to internal Immigration matters. Quoting further: "Most of the current question marks are about the option of a further 180 days extension at local Immigration Offices which are part of the Ministry of Interior which to date has not said a single word about DTV." That's the operative phraseology here. Immigration internally hasn't said anything, probably because they were not forewarned of it, and I think there was some expectation that if they were like sandbagged with it, they would go along. Well clearly whoever came up with that idea doesn't understand the paradigm of Immigration. Their job is not to be a PR entity. Their job is to enforce Thai Immigration Law and Policy and as we've seen over the years, Thai Immigration does not like people living in Thailand affectively on Tourist Visas. They don't mind tourists, tourists are fine, but if you try to live in Thailand and you don't have any other good reason for living here, that's a problem. And for those who say, "well what if I can pay for things, and da, da, da". Yeah I don't want my country invaded any more than I want my other country invaded, which has already been invaded in the US because of all this Open Door Immigration nonsense policy. And I know there are others here in Thailand that agree with that. Yeah, tourists we like, sure, but you don't get to live in Thailand forever based on what? Based on nothing, as we'll get into in other videos, it looks to me like there are already people looking for work arounds for how to not pay the thresholds of money, not show the money in the bank account, all sorts of things. This is why Immigration is being quiet because they're going to have to enforce the law. It's not a matter of PR, it's a matter of enforcement and that's something that sometimes doesn't get good PR. 

So again, as I have discussed another videos, my big problem with this is ultimately it was done for PR purposes and in my opinion likely to get numbers up for high season, which that goal in and of itself I find to be a positive one in a sense, but where they've done it in such a way that come the first and second quarter of 2025, when the rubber hits the road, and these folks that have this Visa are starting to deal with Immigration, it may not be so much positive feedback because the expectations those folks had that this visa is great and it's ongoing forever are probably not going to turn out to be necessarily the case, or at least it may be able to be on-going but the requirements associated with documentation and things for extensions of status in that status, are probably not going to be as rosy and easy as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made out to date.

That being said, quoting further: "With an Immigration Extension, DTV holders would receive a maximum of 360 days (180 + 180) before leaving the country." Again, that presumes that is what's going to happen. They talked about that at the very beginning then Immigration went silent on it and more and more when you see it even talked about, they don't even talk about the notion of it being extendable in the country. More and more how I am seeing it discussed is something akin to a five-year multi-entry Visa akin to the old one-year multi entry visas which had a face validity of a year but you got 90 days of lawful status that required a Border Run. You could never do that based on extension in Thailand in the old days unless you got a proper Work Permit. Again, I do not think extension of status of these visas is a foregone conclusion in country. If anything I think there's a high probability it won't be allowed and there will be heavy scrutiny on people coming back in doing Border Runs on these type of visas because again they don't really want people living here in Tourist Visa status or if they do, much akin to the Elite Visa, they want to be sure that they are high net worth individuals and if it looks like they're going to be doing a lot of gamesmanship to allow people that don't have the financial resources to live here, I expect not only scrutiny will be high but denial of entry will be high as well. That said, quoting further: "Without the Immigration discretion, six months is the maximum stay without interruption." And I think it's very possible that's how DTV ends up. It ends up very much akin again to the old multi-entry visas except it's a five-year thing, not a one-year thing. Then even on top of that, I think they're going to end up with a great deal more scrutiny from Immigration at checkpoints than other Visa categories; I've discussed that in other videos before. That said, quoting further: "Immigration is very reluctant to comment on these contentious issues and a phone call to the hotline brought only the response to look at the DTV official website which of course sheds no relevant light." Yeah, I think there's a reason for all of this. Immigration's mandate is to enforce Immigration Law and Policy and to make sure that non-Thai nationals are not effectively invading the country; that's their purpose. 

Again, I understand other people have their own priorities, even other institutions within the Thai Government have their own priorities including PR and seeing a good high season but at the end of the day Immigration's mandate is again enforcing Thai Immigration Law and Policy.