Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the E-Visa portal. I thought of making this video after reading a recent email to us. "Dear Benjamin and the Integrity Legal Team. I'm a subscriber to your YouTube channel and enjoy your videos on Thailand, relocation, retirement and visas. Thank you for the clear and practical content." Well first of all you're welcome, thank you. Your gratitude is appreciated. That said, quoting further: "I wanted to suggest a possible video topic that I think would resonate with potential retirees, expats in Thailand. The Thai e-Visa website does not clearly show where the commonly known Visa types actually appear in the application system. People hear about the Non-immigrant O, O-A, LTR, Elite, DTV etc., but when they go to the E-Visa Site, none of those labels are used in an obvious way. For retirees in particular, it is not at all clear how to find or apply for the standard Non-Immigrant O Visa. A walk-through video explaining how the traditional visa names map to the actual drop-down menu is on the E-Visa site would be helpful. Something along the lines of: "If you are a retiree looking for an O Visa, this is where it lives on the E-Visa site" and similarly for O-A, LTR and other common options. I say this as someone who eventually figured it out, obtained my Non-Immigrant O Visa and expects to retire to Thailand within the next two months. I'm also a retired diplomat with several years of Visa processing experience, and even I found the E-Visa site surprisingly opaque." Yeah, welcome to the party pal. I mean I feel like John - I might put the that up as the thumbnail for this video - "Welcome to the party pal, from Die Hard". 

Yeah, none of these E-Visa sites, if there's one running theme on this channel it's that I am not a fan of digitization. I haven't been a fan of it in an immigration context from the time I watched the neo-soviet system, which is the only way to describe the way the National Visa Center's online portal works in my mind. It's just, it's clunky, it's difficult to use and from that moment forward, I said to myself none of this is going to get better, the digitization of immigration. 

That said, quoting further: "I understand that Visa assistance is part of what your firm does, so making the system easier to navigate might not be great for business. I say that with a smile. Your educational videos are much appreciated. Thanks again for the excellent content, and I hope this idea is useful."  

Yeah, tip of the hat to you sir.  Thank you. Yeah I'm not going to do a video like that primarily because I actually talked to staff here in the office. I said should I do that, and they said probably not, because they change it so damn often; it's not all that useful. Look, at the end of the day, and this guy sort of brought it up in the email, yeah that is what we do. So on a certain level, but that's not why I'm not going to do a video on that. I'm mostly not going to do a video on it because we will put in a ton of time and energy on it, and then they will change it again. I've seen the Immigration System; we are sitting here in 2026. In the last 4 years, well in the last six, since 2020, I've seen the Immigration System change one, two, if you count Certificates of Entry, Thailand Pass, the light Thailand Pass. Then we saw the system and the Emergency Decree in 2022; we saw things come back online but then the LTR came out, the DTV came along, they tried to roll out this like tax thing and immigration, and then instead they went ahead and did the Digital Arrival Card. The E-Visa portal has rolled out during that period and my girls were telling me that at least twice now, that portal itself has been upgraded; I guess that's the right word, "upgraded". There's no point in making that level of content or that deep of content because they really will just change it, and it's an ongoing theme in immigration generally, is any time the sort of populist figures out how to efficiently start getting visas - this is any system by the way - I mean I can point to the Americans writ large on this right now, where Trump has just paused the system while they are retooling it. Again, they have their policy reasons but the upshot of it will be that it is just going to be harder to use, that's all the upshot of that will be. I mean yeah, they are retooling the Public Charge Rule analysis and stuff like that, but the end result will be it will just be extra steps and extra time for the actual applicant.

This stuff evolves in real time; I try to make topical content to explain to people where we are at in terms of sort of the news of it, but to try and do deep dives into this one, as he points out, there is an element where it is counterproductive to an extent to our business. Frankly we're always going to have business doing visas, I'm not really worried about that. Frankly I just don't want to waste my time doing a deep dive onto a system that could change next week and frankly there is nothing that says it couldn't. Frankly with this new election coming, I don't want to do much of a deep dive on anything in a practical way regarding immigration because I think there is a very real chance policies could shift rather rapidly in the aftermath of an election and a new Parliament coming in. I also think, and the late great Barry Kenyon brought this up, I disagreed with him in the moment, I now think he was prescient, I think a new government, we may very well be looking at an entirely new Immigration Act possibly coming out of Parliament; I could see that actually happening in this upcoming Parliament. So if that was to occur, it would be a total sea change. 

So that's kind of where I stand on all this stuff. I mean we deal with this stuff day to day and the way it evolves so quickly, I just think it would be pointless to make that kind of content here on our channel.