Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question, how about instead of all these crackdowns and things, we do some real immigration reform? Now I thought of making this video initially after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, that's thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Rapid response by Immigration Bureau Officers as surveillance target moves to the Airport from Pattaya. Now the gist of this story, the thrust of this story is about -they basically arrested somebody who had an Interpol Red Notice who was an international drug trafficker - but as I'll get to here in a moment, while on the one hand, the actions of Thai Immigration are laudable, they apprehended this individual; it's a good example of well executed law enforcement, let's start there. But my point is and I don't think that immigration reform should include allowing International drug traffickers to remain in Thailand, but there has been a lot of issues here recently especially the proliferation of all these different visas and things and a ton of opacity and misunderstanding about work authorization rules and things, that we are seeing a lot of folks having problems and being cracked down if you will by Thai Immigration and it's not great for the image of the country. This particular story actually I think is good for the image of the country, but these things that we are reading about where people don't understand what the terms of their visas are, they don't understand what kind of rights or benefits they even have and then they get into issues over it, they get into trouble or other things. Overall, my conclusion in all of this at this point is it's really time to just reform the whole system, rather than continue with this ad hoc manner of creating visas and things that people don't really understand and the terms of them are contradictory to even what the state of law says and these different bodies that say that they can issue these types of travel documents have different criteria associated with them. It's disconcerting and I think again it's inefficient and it could be all streamlined. We could have an Act that even keeps the pre-existing visas sustained, it's just we streamline everything, so people can actually see what the rules on these things are. So I'm going to get into the article I am going to cite. 

Real quickly before I do, I really appreciate, I've noticed folks have showed up of quite a little bit more in terms of volume that we've seen at the Pancake Palace. Those who are unaware, my better half and I set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok for those who like American Diner style food as well breakfast anytime. Pancake Palace as the name implies, we have pancakes and American Diner style breakfast food; we also have an English breakfast on the menu for those Brits in the audience. We've also got hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chilli bowls, buffalo wings. So if you're interested, check out the links in the description below; Pancake Palace, we'd love to see you. 

That said, quoting directly from this recent article in Thai Examiner, again: Rapid response by Immigration Bureau Officers as surveillance target moves to the airport from Pattaya. Quoting directly: "Canadian drug suspect on Interpol Red Notice seized at Suvarnabhumi Airport after Pattaya hideout as Thai Police launch sweeping Crackdown on foreign criminals and tighten visa rules." Yeah, I've been talking about this, this is usually when things happen; late April, early May, going into the low season, we usually see an Immigration crackdown and tightening. Quoting further: "A Canadian national under Immigration Bureau surveillance in a new security crackdown, took a taxi to Suvarnabhumi Airport on Thursday. Soon after, Officers moved to intercept and arrest him based on suspected links to an international drug operation and an Interpol Red Notice issued by Korea. The pursuit was rapid. Officers tracked him to the airport, confirmed his identity and revoked his Tourist Visa. All steps were completed at the same time as he was approached in the Departure Hall and taken into custody." Quoting further: "Immigration Crackdown targets foreign suspects exploiting visas as transnational drug probe intensifies." As I'll get into here, first of all again, the main thrust of this story is the Immigration did their job. Immigration Police found this person and apprehended them, and presumably they will put them through due process and deport them to wherever; it sounds like probably Korea but hard to say, it depends on the sort of underlying facts of the case. 

That said, it's this notion of “suspects exploiting visas and things.” What does that mean exactly? I've seen a lot of this rhetoric recently and my response is instead of worrying about “cracking down” so much, how about we reform the Immigration System so people have a clear idea what the rules are so that - and again there's a big difference between a transnational drug trafficker and just somebody who comes over here on whatever - they come in on an exemption, they come in on a DTV, they come in on a Tourist Visa, they come in on a Business Visa, O Visa, Retirement Visa, whatever, but again, they know the terms of their visas. And we've seen everything just shaken up from one side of the room down the other sort of thing, and it's causing confusion. People don't know like what they're getting with any of these Visas much anymore. Again, I have done many videos previously where I talked about the fact that the standard B Visa, the standard O Visa, especially the standard O Retirement Visas. These, in my opinion, are the rocks that you can sort of - not to mix metaphors - but it's a Visa you can hang your hat on because we know what the terms of it are, because they emanate from the Immigration Act of 1979. There's been these other bodies that just sort of created certain Visas out of whole cloth and then sort of unilaterally said that they have these terms and they are not as bound by the restrictions under the Immigration Act. I don't see where they have that authority to unilaterally do that where the Immigration Act is clear in what it says. 

With that in mind, quoting further: "Meanwhile, Deputy Commanders, Pol. Col. Decho Sosuwannakul and Pol. Col. Chinawut Tangwonglert coordinated enforcement actions. Authorities said such suspects often use Thailand as a temporary refuge. Therefore, surveillance operations were expanded in key locations. Subsequently, intelligence reports pointed to a drug trafficking Network in Pattaya. Notably, a Canadian nationalist flagged as hiding in the area. As a result, orders were issued by Pol.  Col. Suriya Phuangsombat and the investigation division team. Officers began gathering intelligence and verifying movements. Meanwhile, Deputy Superintendents and Inspectors were assigned specific roles. The operation continued until about noon on April 22, 2026. At that stage, Officers were confirming the suspect's identity. However, the situation shifted rapidly. On Thursday, the suspect had already left his Pattaya residence by taxi. Therefore, officers moved immediately to intercept him. They tracked his vehicle along an inbound motorway toward Bangkok." 

So again, this video kind of has sort of two prongs to it. One and the thing to get across to people is Thai Immigration and the Police Department in Thailand, the various police agencies in Thailand, are very proactive in dealing with international criminals; of that there is no doubt. My issue here is due to the vagueness and due to all the sort of - it's almost scatterbrained the way the Immigration System now currently looks - with all the different visa options, and then all the different vicissitudes with them for example right now, the Elite Visa is undergoing a ton of extra scrutiny and basically people are being put through a bunch of hassles that it was my understanding the Elite Visa was supposed to solve, but again we haven't really seen that. 

Meanwhile, we've seen these new long stay visas come to the foreground and it's apparently being brought forth in some sort of Phuket sandbox sort of initiative. So therefore, the question has to be asked, does this apply nationwide? How does it apply? Apparently, it only applies under certain circumstances and based on going through sort of a certain funnel. The Immigration System is too convoluted and confusing at this point for people to really even understand how to be a compliance with it; I’m having a hard time. Work authorization especially, it's like more and more we are seeing all these crackdowns on work authorization but then you'll hear sort of the other side of the story which is people thought that they were work authorised and it's part of the fact that again, when they rolled out the DTV, they intentionally kept it vague because they were trying to get numbers in, and then people came in and realized, "oh I can't do any banking, I’m not actually work authorised for Thailand. What's the point of this visa?" Meanwhile, you're only supposed to get one extension on it, and I saw somebody who put up, "oh, that's one extension a year." That's not what was said initially. I remember when they were pushing it out, they said, "No you get one extension for the entire 5-year period. The DTV's presumption was that people weren't living here, and then it's this whole notion of what is a nomad. Again this vagueness, it leads to more problems down the road. Law enforcement has to do more in dealing with people who end up outside the law but don't know it, because they are detrimentally relying on a Visa that they thought covered them. At the same time, there are all these different visas which is creating a ton of inefficiency. My personal opinion is at this point, the late great Barry Kenyon over the past summer, he brought up the fact - before he passed away tragically - that there was likely to be a possible Bill in Parliament for comprehensive Immigration reform. I didn't think that was likely at the time. I now think not only is it possible, that it probably should happen if for no other reason, look I'm not making these videos - I think people think I have got a problem with these new visas and things. What I have a problem with is the fact that most folks coming in think they are getting one thing and they are ending up with something else. Then they're having all sorts of problems and the people that are trying to explain the situation in an objective manner, sort of vilify, because at least in my case, people think I'm doing it for some kind of personal gain. 

Look, at the end of the day, I'm going to keep making videos and this law firm will still be here; I'm not particularly worried about that. But the problem we are seeing I think it's going to have a detrimental impact on the tourism sector here in Thailand. People travelling in, people who are legitimately looking to invest, upending the entire system and then making it confusing only to see people crackdown and deported and things, it's just a bad situation all around. I've said this before. Bad policy leads to bad outcomes. To my mind very apparent with the DTV for a variety of different reasons, but again just this whole situation where we have all this like panoply of visas, sort of pantheon of visas and they're all different, they all have their own different rules. I can get into all kinds of analysis on even tangential aspects associated with them, for example taxes associated with the LTR which everybody thinks is one thing; I'm waiting to see what it really is as I've discussed at length since it came out.

But that said, all of his leads to a situation where in my opinion people are confused or they feel like that there's so much opacity associated with all of this, they just throw up their hands and say I'm going somewhere else. That's not good for anybody. That's not good for Thailand; it's not good for them. So my hope is that moving forward, especially in this new Parliament, we actually see a move toward comprehensive Immigration reform, rather than chasing after all of these people for violations on things that they thought that they were in compliance with, because there was kind of this vague notion in the presentation if you will of these visas that they were getting a certain basket or bundle of benefits, when in reality, they didn't realize they really weren’t getting all of that. It's leading to a bad situation for both the expat community as well as for Thailand as a whole.