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The question posed by this video is "Is Thai Immigration overloaded?" In the sense of "Is its infrastructure, sort of because of the new demands brought down by all the new arrivals, is it sort of overloaded?" It's a good question. 

I thought of it when I was reading this recent article from the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: What will 2023 hold for Pattaya Tourism? Quoting directly: "The largest question for Pattaya in 2023 is its infrastructure. The local Immigration Bureau is already at its busiest level since pre-Covid days mostly because of initial address registration requirements." Okay, so yeah we have definitely seen up here in Bangkok as well, that Thai Immigration is dealing with much higher volumes than they have dealt with really for about the last two, three years and that is kind of to be expected when you consider we only recently just got reopened fully and there has been a massive influx of foreign nationals coming in to Thailand. So I mean it stands to reason that it is going to be busy.

Now that said, in the past TM30 address reporting was not nearly as prevalent as it once was and now we are dealing with that, especially for new arrivals much more frequently. Meanwhile, the same old folks that are here all the time, Expats, Thai Business Visa holders, Education Visa holders, Retirement Visa holders, O Marriage Visa holders, all those folks still have to continue dealing with their visas.  So I mean that case load is still going to always kind of be churning over. Then meanwhile, all the influx of new folks that is going to sort of add to the overall volume as well. So where does that leave us? Well it leaves us in a situation where yeah, Thai Immigration is dealing with a much higher volume than it is usually used to dealing with. Is it overloaded? I'm hard pressed to see how that would be the case especially when you consider the fact that in 2022 apparently we saw 10 million total tourists come in to Thailand which was definitely good. It was far better than 2021 or 2020, well it might not have been better in raw terms to 2020 but I am pretty sure it was better than 2021 insofar they weren't a lot of numbers coming into Thailand in 2021.

Long story short, is it overloaded? I don't think so in any meaningful way. They have added a lot of staff; they added a lot of staff before COVID came online; there's digitization in the overall administration of the system, so I think overall probably the word "overloaded" is not quite correct although that said it is definitely busier than it has been any time in the recent past so yeah to one degree or another they are dealing with more volume. Has it caused, I can remember going back a few years ago when they were processing cases into the overnight because they had some internal rule changes that just resulted in a lot of extra case work being done in the Non-Immigrant Visa unit. We are not seeing anything like that for Non-Immigrant Visas at this time it. We will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.