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As the title of this video suggests, we are positing the question: "the Thais don't want us here?" "US" being foreign as I guess here in Thailand. I thought of making this after a couple of comments popped up on one of our prior videos and quoting directly from the first comment: "No they don't want us living here without proper documentation." Then I got this other one which is: "I am pissed off" (and then it's got a big frowny face), quoting further: "Retirees are constantly pumping money into Thailand's economy all year long. Tourists are also doing the same, for less time but in slightly higher quantities. I was here last year 2022 for 9 months with the STV" (that was the Special Tourist Visa), quoting further: "My stay and the required paperwork cost me a lot of money. 2 days ago I arrived with a Visa at the entrance with the plan to stay for 60 days. This is my itinerary. The Immigration girl at the Bangkok Airport after questioning me why I am back in Thailand, she almost wanted to deny me entry to the country. In 6 years that I have been visiting Thailand, I have not had a day overstay and this has never happened before. I have spent more than AUS$ 200,000 in this country until today. What is happening? Are they completely idiots?" Well no, I don't think anybody is an idiot.

What I think is going on here is that you have got to understand tourism status is viewed by Immigration Authorities throughout the world as precisely that, tourism, you're here temporarily. When they start seeing a lot of time being built up in the aggregate on so-called tourism stents or if they see that okay perhaps there's a small departure time, there's like a window of time for a brief period, that somebody is gone and then they are back again after they have been here on that first trip quite a long while, they start scrutinizing things heavily. A perfect example of this in another context is American Immigration. US Immigration in the United States, if you go in on a Tourist Visa and you stay the full six months, try to do a one-day border run to Mexico or Canada and turn back around, believe me Immigration is going to have an issue with that and you are probably not going to be re-admitted to the country. In fact you may be deemed inadmissible as an intending immigrant without proper documentation. I think that same kind of thinking is going on within Thai Immigration wherein they are saying, "hey look if you spent the majority of the whole year in Thailand in tourist status, then leave for a couple months and try to return again on tourism status, we're going to scrutinize that. We are going to want to know what that is."

So again, now I am not necessarily defending what happened here. If may have been more of an over-the-top situation than I am reading it to be but when I see that somebody spent nine months in the Kingdom in one calendar year and then is gone for a little while and comes back again on a tourist visa, I can kind of see the argument where the Immigration Officer may have had some concerns about that. One way to deal with this is to get into a Non-Immigrant Visa for example a Thailand Elite Visa is one way to deal with it. Again for those over 50 a Retirement Visa either an O or an O-A retirement Visa may be a viable way of dealing with that. Somebody who is married to a Thai, if you have a Thai spouse, you may be able to deal with an O Marriage Visa which again is a Non-immigrant Visa and you are not going to see these problems that you often see with folks that have built up a lot of time in country in tourism status where they are trying to return to the Kingdom of Thailand.