Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thailand's new Immigration Management System; let's just jump in here. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Immigration to be digitized with new app. Quoting directly: "Amazon Web Services, Digital Identity Co Ltd and the Thai Immigration Bureau have partnered to develop the Thailand Immigration Management System, the country's first web and mobile platform for this sector." Now I made another video contemporaneously with this one where I get into sort of my own thoughts about all of this and some concerns I have. If you're interested in that side of the sort of analysis, check out that other video. This video we're just going to talk about the nuts and bolts of what they say they're rolling out, and my analysis associated therewith. 

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That said, quoting further: "The app is designed to modernize immigration services for Thailand which receives roughly 30 million foreign visitors a year, with Bangkok ranked the world's most-visited city by international arrivals in 2025. THIM is scheduled to launch on October 1, developed by Digital Identity and leveraging AWS cloud services." Again, Digital Identity Co Ltd. That is a private company okay, that is handling people's data. Why? And why does that need to be there? Why isn't there just the state doing this, if this is such a concern? Quoting further: "The Immigration Bureau envisions THIM" - or whatever you call this - "becoming a "super app" for foreigners in Thailand." Yeah, I'm sure most foreigners when they start using this thing are going to find it real super; I talked about this in the other video. If anybody remembers the online 90-day reporting mechanism, as well as other mechanisms, again the online process associated Destination Thailand Visas, associated with other issuance of visas, anybody that dealt with the online system associated with Certificates of Entry in Thailand, yeah super app, "super-soviet app" might be the way to put it. I mean it may be fine, it may turn out to be fine, but I have just seen this play out before. They always roll out these things as the greatest innovation ever and we're still dealing with an analog system. That said, quoting further: "Reducing paperwork for expats and long-stay workers while paving the way for automated airport channels for tourists." Why don't you just do automated airport channels? Why does this 'pave the way, for anything? You have the facial recognition technology; it can be done. Other countries do it without all this extra stuff. Quoting further: quote: "THIM positions Thailand at the forefront of Southeast Asia's digital immigration transformation through a national mobile platform," said Pol Maj Gen Pratya Prasarnsuk, Deputy Commissioner of the Immigration Bureau, at the AWS Summit Bangkok yesterday." Quoting further: "The Bureau previously relied on manual blue slips and outsourced data entry. Last year it introduced the web-based Thailand Digital Arrival Card (TDAC), which processed more than 10 million travellers. However, frequent visitors complained they had to re-enter all 20 fields for every trip. With THIM, travellers complete their full profile only once." - so okay, the prior digital system that they rolled out, it's not optimal. So now let's roll another digital system; neat. I am sure it is just going to be fantastic. And again, once you see dialectics, it's very difficult to ever unsee dialectics. Problems, Reactions, Solutions. The so-called problem being, it's not efficient enough or easy enough or convenient enough to use TDAC, which in my opinion okay, we used to have Digital Arrival Cards, fine, but why did we even go off of that? And again, especially where we are using biometrics, do we even need to do some of this stuff? I mean you know who's coming in. Do we have to have all of this data? Well apparently they want it. But I also like how the shortcomings of the prior system - which isn't that old by the way, it only rolled out within the last 2 years - are now being used to sort of bootstrap the reasoning behind the idea that we now need this extra super Orwellian totalitarian system, so neato, good, neat - "With THIM, travellers complete their full profile only once. On future visits, they need to update just a few details," - yeah, I'm sure it's just a few details, right - "such as the flight number and return date. The bureau said the process can reduce arrival card completion time to about 3 minutes." People can write it in 3 minutes on the old analog system. Again these so-called "improvements", everything associated with digitization, and I have watched this over 20 years, I saw it start in the US immigration system, I saw it migrate over here. None of it has gotten better; none of it has gotten more efficient; none of it has gotten easier, and any time there's any kind of peccadillo issue that in the past you could just talk to somebody or check a box or write something in the margin of a piece of paper, now it's a huge neo-soviet Kafkaesque catch-22, circular, just wild goose chase oftentimes is what it turns into. That said, quoting further: "The app is available now for pilot downloads and uses an electronic Know Your Customer process to verify user information against passport details." What does that mean? And by the way, we're not customers. We are just people travelling. This isn't about customers, this isn't about - and again, it's this phraseology to get us all sort of herded into this system. This is a bad place we are going. 

I understand what Thai immigration is trying to do. They have a mandate to deal with the foreign population of Thailand. Set that aside for a minute. I'm talking about all of this digitization, all across the board. It's a bad place that we are going. It culminates in Central Bank Digital Currencies. That's what they've been going for since 2020. I think COVID was largely a pretext to try to get that going. The first couple of articles I remember reading when the COVID narrative got off the ground was, "oh money, cash is dirty, and therefore we need to do everything digitally so that we don't interact with cash and make each other sick" even though we need to make each other sick for our immune systems to remain robust, but let's leave that aside. Again, this doesn't go to a real good place and that is where my concerns are at with all of this stuff. "Travellers do not need to show a QR code at immigration counters, according to the Bureau." Well neat, thanks. I mean again, all of this is presented as if - 5 years ago no one had even heard of QR codes associated with Immigration, and frankly, I really am getting resentful of the implication that all of us humans can just be boiled down to a QR code, and then to say "well we're not going to do that" as some kind of like "yippee", yeah, you shouldn't be doing it. Quoting further: "Their data syncs directly with the Bureau's system, allowing officers to confirm the completed digital form when they scan a physical passport." Well okay. To some extent I can understand how that works. You do your form online, they check the passport, boom, pops up, they see it. That said, again and I know there were certain costs associated with paper, but I think long term we're going to miss paper. I just do. That said, quoting further: "The app supports English, Russian, Japanese and Chinese, with plans to expand to 15 languages. In the future, the bureau wants THIM to become a comprehensive digital platform for all foreigners living in Thailand, featuring appointment booking, electronic extension services, online pre-submission of documents, status change applications and issuance of transaction-related certification documents." Well a couple of things here. One, appointment booking - we've seen them inject like a third-party private company into the process of getting Work Permits now, whereas once you could just ‘first come, first serve’ get appointments, this private company now says it only allows X number of appointments, period. Even though there is, and I know there's capacity for the Government to be able to process more, no, no, this buffer this private company like I'm sure not unlike Digital Identity Co Ltd will stand in between us for whether or not we get appointments, when and how we get them. And I've already seen this rolled out in the context of Thailand's Employment Bureau specifically with regard to Work Permit issuance or renewal, and again, what they are doing is actually they are basically restraining the number of appointments one can get even though there are people that need it done. This is inefficiency of the highest order of magnitude. It's why I can't stand the World Economic Forum and their push to turn everything into public-private - and I understand there are public-private consortiums here in Thailand - those things were set up in a much more good faith way where they are trying to best serve the public in an efficient manner. This stuff that emanates from World Economic Forum, it's the opposite. It's designed so that the private sector can tell you, "oh we can't do that, that's a government function" and then the government can turn around and say "well we can't do that as the government’, and then again, you end up in this catch-22; it is like a dog chasing its tail. And again, doing extensions and things by that? Really? Do people think that's going to work better? You know where a lot of this stuff, these extensions are done on discretionary bases etc. I've already seen how the digital system works in the context of the Foreign Ministry, specifically Embassies and Consulates abroad. It was easier to process on paper; I'm here to tell you. That said, quoting further: "For expats, THIM can support mandatory 90-day reporting and official electronic document requests" - really? Support mandatory 90-day reporting? We have already seen that system. It doesn't really work very well - "and official electronic document requests" - great, yeah. - "reducing visits to provincial Immigration Offices." Except for the fact that you want to see someone in person when you are dealing with documentation that pertains to your ongoing status in a country. You don't want a faceless; again, what, the AI just answers everything now? It's on the AI's decision whether or not people get to stay in Thailand? I can't imagine how that could go wrong. Quoting further: "Long-term Visa holders, including those on the Board of Investment or diplomatic status, may be able to access automated airport channels" - may be able to access - "automated airport channels through facial recognition technology that compares real-time mobile photos with identity data stored in passport chips." Well, neato. You can be bagged and tagged and go through like cattle even faster. Quoting further: quote: "We plan to work with private companies to offer exclusive privileges, benefits and freebies to tourists," said Pol Maj Gen Pratya." Why? Why is that Immigration's function? Immigration's function is to process foreigners, weed out the ones we don't want here. Since when did it become their job to work with private companies to offer exclusive privileges? At whose detriment? If these are exclusive privileges to private companies, handed out from the public trust, who is getting short-changed here? Quoting further: "Natakorn Tanachaihirun, Chief Executive of Digital Identity, added that "the border is Thailand's front door". Huh?

Again, this whole article, I did another video where I was talking about this “sovereignty by design” which I'm not going to get into - it goes on further in the article - but just platitudinous nonsense throughout this whole article when talking about rolling this out; that's what causes my hackles to go up. When they start talking with phrases that don't make any sense and in sort of redundant circular language and start talking about goody bags to go out to private businesses from a public institution; it causes a lot of concern for me. That said, quoting further: "THIM''s architecture uses AWS services such as artificial intelligence-powered optical character recognition for passport document verification, e-KYC workflows" - which what is that? - "compute orchestration, security and compliance."

So clearly the conclusion to be drawn right now is that Thailand is attempting to roll out this sort of digital immigration platform. We have seen him try to do this before. Again I don't think there's going to be any major changes other than maybe to the TDAC system and some of the stuff people do when they're at the airport anytime soon. I may be wrong on that but I kind of doubt it especially when it comes to the issue of visa extensions etc., especially in light of the fact that we have recently seen the Visa Exemption status, basically visa-free stays collapse back down from 60 days down to 30 days, so again we are going to see more extensions out there anyway.

I'm just not a big believer that all this digitization and AI is the saviour that everyone claims it is. If anything, and from what I've seen from personal experience, it makes everything more difficult. We have seen it with banking. I mean it was rolled out “oh everything's going to be easier” – no, now you have got to do Biometrics; now if your phone number isn't perfectly synced with every data point that they have in their system, they freeze your account. They freeze accounts now associated with trying to get Retirement Visa Extensions etc. Again not even apropos of Immigration. This is the banks coming up with this and again it's all through this OECD, World Economic Forum rubric of "we will all own nothing and be happy" and apparently, we will all be bagged and tagged like chattel and moved all around and I find it truly, truly disheartening. I'm hoping that we don't see this roll out the way that it is looking to me like it's rolling out. That being said, it remains to be seen and we will certainly be keeping folks updated on this channel as the situation evolves.