Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Permanent Residence, specifically interviews. I thought of making this video after reading what would appear at first glance to be sort of a unrelated article in the Bangkok Post that's bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Phue Thai asks Government to refrain from transferring Officials. Quoting directly: "The caretaker government should maintain the traditional code of ethics and strictly comply with the Constitution by not transferring any of the high-level officials particularly Permanent Secretaries for various Ministries, while a new government is in the process of taking over the country's administration, Phue Thai Party Deputy Leader, Phumtham Wechayachai said in his statement issued on Friday." Quoting further: "The Permanent Secretaries for all Ministries, in particular, are most important mechanisms for the new government's administration, he said."

Yeah, so the thing to understand and the thing to take away from this video with regard to Permanent Residence and again I urge those who are watching this video, go read that article in detail if you want some further insight there but bear in mind, the thrust of that article goes to different way from this video. This video, we are talking about Permanent Residence and yeah the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Interior plays a pretty significant role in the process of obtaining Permanent Residence as ultimately it is the Interior Ministry which grants that benefit. Ultimately it's going to be the actual Minister of the Interior Ministry who is going to actually have to end up signing off on the acquisition of Thai Permanent Residence and that's after a prolonged process up to that point of dealing with various Immigration Officers as well as dealing with the Ministry itself and that Bureaucracy is in and of itself kind of a prickly endeavour. Again it is not particularly fast moving and it requires a great deal of documentation and a great deal of preparation and then weaving through the sort of Byzantine if you will, the sort of Byzantine nature of just bureaucracy generally. Again, a lot of this stuff ends up being coordinated by a Permanent Secretary specifically the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Interior. I remember my citizenship, my naturalization interview, which is slightly different than Permanent Residence but they do have many similarities in terms of processing and protocols, not least of which is the fact that Interior Ministry is heavily involved with both the process of getting Permanent Residence as well as citizenship. I remember going through the citizenship process and yeah the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Interior himself was one of the actual interviewers at one of my final interviews associated with citizenship. So in some cases sometimes with PR, although it does tend to be a little different in the PR process, the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Interior is probably going to be substantially involved in the coordination of those matters as well as possibly at certain points in the process, having something akin to an adjudicatory function in terms of the review of those applications. As again I stated, the Minister of Interior ultimately has to sign off on these applications so presumably it is going to pass through the desk of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry as well. These folks are pretty important to the overall process, so it's something to bear in mind when thinking about applying for Permanent Residence in Thailand. 

Also something to bear in mind is the window only opens at usually toward the end of the fourth quarter in any given calendar year. It remains to be seen when that window is going to open. Generally speaking it is my understanding the Minister of Interior has the final decision on when the window will open although again I suspect that is probably executed by the Permanent Secretary in conjunction with other functionaires within that Ministry itself. So again worth noting and also note if you are thinking about doing PR and you think that you are eligible, it's probably a good time to contact a legal professional and gain some insight and guidance as you want to have a lot of good lead time before the actual window opens to file for PR because you are going to want to prepare and believe me when I say this, the application, the petition packages for Permanent Residence in Thailand can be very large; they usually include a great deal of information and documentation so you want to get a good head start on preparing that application and getting it submitted here in the Kingdom of Thailand.