Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Visa agent horror stories. I am not going to tell people what to do, you can use whatever service provider you feel like using but I have had a lot of people, not a lot, but every now and then somebody will ask me and just recently somebody did when I was having a discussion on the phone, they basically said: "Well what is the difference between what you do and what a Visa Agent does?" Well quite honestly, the difference is profound in many ways. To kind of go back here a moment, not to give too big of a history lesson here but Visa Agents I think came about in the breach. They kind of came about at a very different time with respect to Immigration both in Thailand and in the US and globally. What I mean to say is there was a time, and frankly there is a big piece of me notwithstanding the fact I do Immigration work, that would kind of prefer to go back to this time, there was a time when Immigration was viewed as a purely administrative matter. You have foreigners in your country; you need to keep track of them; you go ahead and do that. You issue them a Visa and they need to renew it but if something happens we are not going to fly too off the handle about things like a minor overstay and the other thing is it was not viewed as an adjudication or as a matter that is sort of a law enforcement kind of paradigm. 

The reason I bring this up is that era is over fundamentally. It is just at an end. Immigration matters are very much an adjudication. Here in Thailand especially we have seen, I have seen it and anybody that has been an expat here has watched the paradigm shift from Immigration as administrative record keeping to Immigration as law enforcement. We saw this very dramatically with the rise of Big Joke in the Immigration apparatus and the crackdowns associated with people on overstay and the crackdowns on people on Education Visas, so-called Volunteer Visas and things and we saw a massive, massive crackdown of this. In the afternoon of that Immigration in Thailand is very much a species of law enforcement. Yeah, in the broader context just across the board, US Immigration for example you don't want to go anywhere near a so-called Visa Agent. I mean US Immigration is hard enough and they have made it so obtuse now that I mean even frankly American Attorneys like myself who have had years of experience, they are just throwing up roadblocks and obstacles for no real reason, candidly. I have had cases here recently where I am sitting there thinking "Why are they doing this? There's no reason to do this." but here we are. I mean you can point at the last Administration but we are getting to be on to 2 years into this Administration and we haven't seen very much change. Hopefully that will change in the American Immigration context sooner rather than later. 

With respect to horror stories, especially during COVID, I had like a half a dozen folks that contacted us that wound up in overstay, didn't have their passports because they handed it off to a Visa Agent who said they could work miracles or get something done and they didn't; they just disappeared in some cases. In other cases there were unscrupulous, quite frankly illegal, "Visa Agents" who were engaging in fraudulent activity or they were engaging in illicit activity that resulted in folks having visas that were essentially either later determined to be illegitimate or they were determined that they were completely fraudulent and they were determined to be in overstay. Then on top of this, there is nothing worse than handing your passport off to somebody and you never hear from them again, so now you have got to deal with your own Embassy to get a passport back before you can even deal with the problems of your Visa. We saw a lot of this so when people ask me: "What is the difference between you and a Visa agent?" Well the difference between me and a Visa Agent is we are a law firm. I am an Attorney. The other folks here in the firm that handle clients cases, they are Attorneys. Yes we have folks, paralegals and assistance staff, clerks etc. that also assist in these cases but at the end of the day you are dealing with legal professionals. You are not dealing with somebody who just when everything goes wrong, they just turn off their phone and you never hear from them again.