Transcript of the above video: 

It is not often but it's not unheard of for me to read an article in the Thai Press and think of making a video about US Immigration, but here we are. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article in the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Football and movie streaming hub in Thailand raided by police. Quoting directly: "The Department of Special Investigations (DSI) has released details of a recent raid on a large Warehouse in Pak Kret, a city in Nonthaburi province which is part of the greater Bangkok metropolitan area. The 8,000 sqm premises, a massive centre of signal interception and conversion, hosted a major illegal streaming service, mostly involving international football and Hollywood movies. Police seized large numbers of signal decoding boxes and paraphernalia, satellite technology and mobile phones." And then quoting further: "Pattaya over the years has had a troubled history of illegal streaming services. In 2002, a technician fell off a condominium building as he was trying to fix a satellite dish which provided pirate viewing of 400 international programs. In 2008 a British entrepreneur publicly but foolishly offering to sell decoder boxes "so you can watch Coronation Street at the same time they watch it in Manchester" was arrested and deported."

So those two stories just alone got me to thinking. I've had pages actually where Thai folks have been involved in selling for what we would call “bootleg” merchandise so like t-shirts and things with trademarks on them or trademarked material that they did not have permission, they had not gone through proper channels to buy them and to resell them. This can lead to what's called a CIMT finding in a later visa application for the United States. CIMT stands for Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude, and they can be really innocuous. CIMT is a really problematic area for some people over really innocuous things, but it comes down to - I actually had a case involving somebody who made a fake parking pass to use a parking garage, and for whatever reason they decided to do that - pretty innocuous thing, but it led to a finding of inadmissibility later because even though it was a minor citation under Thai Law, it came up on the criminal background check when they were processing for a US Immigration benefit, in this case I think it was a Fiancé(e) Visa and it was something we had to deal with through the waiver process. And the waiver process can be time consuming and onerous and costly, and it can stem from some fairly seemingly minor issues associated with crimes involving moral turpitude, like in the case of being caught at an illegal streaming service, which again this was a pretty sophisticated major operation. It is not insignificant, but something as insignificant as selling T-shirts at a stall that don't have proper copyright on them and getting cited by the police, that's an example of something that can happen or creating a fake parking pass is something that can happen, that can create CIMT findings. Then at that point, you have to deal with the I-601 Waivers process wherein you got to prove extreme hardship to a qualifying relative in the United States, all kinds of things in order to get past that prior finding of inadmissibility have to be dealt with and it can be again a cumbersome and expensive process.

So again not often that I read something in the sort of Thai police blotter if you will or I should say the English language press of the Thai police blotter that gets me to think about US Immigration but that particular article did, and it does pertain to crimes involving moral turpitude and I-601 Waivers to get oneself into the United States presumably at least for purposes of this video, from the Kingdom of Thailand.