Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing well just Thai Immigration generally. The reason for the title and the reason for the video is I don't think people fully understand that generally speaking, unless we are under some kind of special set of circumstances like we were under during the Emergency Decree from the end of March of 2020 until going back to I believe October of 2022, during that time period, we were under the Emergency Decree so sort of standard Immigration protocols didn't really apply. However, we have reverted back to the status quo ante, we are now back to where we were at in quarter one of 2020 which is just sort of the unadulterated sort of standard Thai Immigration if you want to call it that. The question posed and sort of the observation being made by this video is yeah New Year's tends to be a time when if you are going to see major policy shifts within Thai Immigration they tend to do it after the New Year, that has just been my experience. If they are going to roll out a lot of major new initiatives, they tend to wait for the New Year. Now some I am sure in the expat community will be out there arguing, "Oh it's all about High season. They don't want to disrupt the high season, they will do it after the New Year" which is kind of the zenith of the high season although not really the end of it. Everybody that lives out here we all kind of know that even later February there is still kind a high scene residual. I have always kind of noticed that as far as overall correspondence and things, at least for us here at the firm it tends to drop off in about mid-March, we just sort of see it just fall into a cliff and we wait around for a couple of weeks and then sort of folks coming in for Songkran and stuff and you start hearing from people again. But yeah high season does have a definitive end, probably sometime in February if you want to be strict about it but sort of the apogee of it if you want to look at it that way is the New Year.

And yeah, maybe there are some high season concerns within Immigration Policy makers thinking they don't really want to disrupt that. I suspect that will definitely be at the forefront of most people's minds presently, under the current circumstances. But more to the point, you have got to remember to think like folks that work in the Government. I don't use the term bureaucratic as a pejorative term, I just use it to describe what folks are; bureaucrats are bureaucrats. Quite honestly they are very similar the world over in kind of the way that they think. They tend to do things in my opinion, in a very sort of expedient manner. If it makes sense in terms of timing and efficiency they are going to do it that way and a good sort of water shed if you're looking at it from a bureaucratic standpoint is the New Year. Everything shuts down, there is a prolonged holiday, then everything opens back up and it's a new year and it's just if you are going to implement new policy and I am not saying this always happens but generally speaking where we see policy changes, we tend to see them at the New Year unless they are a major sort of banner policy change and then you usually see that a different time of year not necessarily coinciding or correlating with the changeover in the calendar.