Transcript of the above video: 

I have recently seen a few reports of Thai Police really getting serious about cracking down on illegal foreigners here in Thailand to the point that they are even going undercover in increasingly sophisticated manners in order to apprehend them. And for those who spend a lot of time in Bangkok and know lower Sukhumvit, you'll probably know the area they are talking about that has been apparently cleared out of some of these illegal operators. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: 'Construction Workers' arrest Nigerian drug traffickers in Bangkok's Nana. Quoting directly: "Undercover police who dressed like construction workers arrested numerous suspected Nigerian drug traffickers in the Nana area of Bangkok early Sunday morning. Pol. Maj. Gen. Theeradet Thumsuthee, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Bureau, said 40 plain clothes detectives -- dressed mostly as a team of concrete workers -- arrested eight Nigerian men and a Thai suspect aged 23 - 41 in the Nana area, Bangkok just after 12am Sunday. According to the Deputy Bangkok Police Chief, the undercover operation by Bangkok and Narcotics Suppression Police on Sukhumvit 11 Road in Watthana district respond to online complaints and warnings about African drug traffickers and pick pockets annoying tourists in the Nana area." I urge those who are watching this video, go read that article in detail. You can see the activities that the Royal Thai Police undertook in order to round up these folks. 

Meanwhile, it seems like this was a pretty wide sweeping thing. Another article, again from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Drug den busted at Nana barber shop in Bangkok. Quoting directly: "Bangkok Police arrested eight suspects including six foreign men, a Thai woman and a Myanmar woman at a barber shop on Nana Road (Sukhumvit Soi 3) where they said narcotics were available. The Metropolitan Police Bureau said that while strolling on Nana Road at 11pm on Wednesday, plainclothes officers were greeted by two foreign men who offered them "a single snort that will bring you to a pyramid peak". Quoting further: "The foreigners then brought the undercover policemen to a barbershop on the top floor of a five-storey building on Nana Road. They were taken to a secret room where the suspect showed them pills priced at 2,000 baht each." And again, I urge you if you are watching this video, go check out that article for further details on what happened there. But again, what it shows is this overarching theme from the Thai Police of taking further measures to combat illegal foreigners here in Thailand. 

I talked about this here recently. There was a major paradigm shift some years back from immigration being viewed internally and within itself, as being primarily sort of an administrative function as it pertained to a lot of foreign nationals in Thailand, to being a law enforcement function. We sort of saw the peak of that paradigm shift during the height of "Big Joke's" era over at Immigration where he was scrutinizing folks' applications and doing a lot of roundups, things very similar to what we just saw with regard to these sweeps that have been done on lower Sukhumvit here in Bangkok here recently where they were cracking down on this. 

We've seen another paradigm shift here within the past couple of weeks; I did a video on it explicitly. It is very important to understand, at least conceptually, just how big of a shift this was that with the violence that occurred at the border this past summer, it created sort of the impetus to put up the barriers and things along the Thai-Cambodian border. This is having an even more pervasive impact within the paradigm of immigration generally where National Security is being more and more viewed as the paramount priority with regard to immigration enforcement.  Law enforcement also has a component of that but I think we're seeing things like the level of sophistication they went to with regard to these raids and having these officers undercover in large numbers in lower Sukhumvit to round all this stuff up. I think again it reinforces the fact that this theme exists within the paradigm of Thai Immigration that they are cracking down on folks that are breaking law here that are foreign. They are also looking at it from the standpoint of National Security and for that reason this is being prioritized from a bureaucratic standpoint. 

So this is something to keep in mind not only from a law enforcement perspective, but from an Immigration perspective as well.