Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well we are discussing exactly what the title suggests, Thai visas and are they as confusing as possible? I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on one of our prior videos, quoting directly: "It sounds like Thailand has an entire team of people whose sole purpose is to make all these visas and permits as confusing as possible so that there is no way anybody could figure them out." 

I can see how you could think that but that is actually not the case. What you are looking at in my experience and observation from looking at especially the Thai Immigration System and especially the Thai Immigration System and its interaction with the Labour Department when you are dealing with work permits, is that it has accreted over time. Now the baseline law if you will is the Immigration Act of 1979 but there is regulation stemming from that. As we have discussed in other videos, for example the Thai Retirement Visa is entirely a regulatory construction. It arises from the discretion granted to the Immigration Department under the Immigration Act but it is created by regulation, it is not created by the law itself. Now the law says that Immigration can create new Visa categories if and when it is deemed appropriate pursuant to the law and in line with further regulation that they are allowed to do that as they have done for example with the O and the O-A Retirement Visas just one example which isn't specifically mentioned in the Act itself. 

That said, over time yeah these visa categories are sort of created and they sort of pile one on top of the other and then when you get into Work Permits as we have discussed in other videos, the history of that is rather fascinating because the Work Permits didn't exist when the Immigration Act was promulgated in '79, there just weren't Work Permits. They didn't come around until later in the 80s. That is one of the reasons it seems very confusing because you have got sort of these two stovepipe if you will bureaucracies that are operating kind of in tandem that one has to deal with if one is looking to do business here in Thailand. 

So the thing to take away from this video and the thing to understand is no there is not a concerted effort to make these things confusing or make them difficult or be opaque but there is if you will kind of an institutional inertia that kind of kicks in where over time these visas are created and these rules associated with them are created kind of in a I hesitate say in a vacuum but when they are created they are sort of created sort of fit to purpose and then when they become sort of part of the broader mosaic of Thai Immigration Law, it can become kind of complicated to the point of being Byzantine I would argue. So yeah it's not intentionally done but I can totally see where people could get confused just because of the nature of the overall system.