Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "Is there a new Immigration Chief in Bangkok, or specifically here in Thailand". I guess he would be in Bangkok but for Thailand generally, Thai Immigration Bureau Chief and yes, there is in fact a new Thai Immigration Bureau Chief. This has come online here in the past few weeks. We have been kind of concentrated on the ending of quarantine for inbound travelers as well as news like the end of the Certificate of Entry regime and the creation of the so-called Thailand Pass which if you have been watching some of our videos you will see that is not really all that different on endeavour.

I think this is actually bigger news than it has been given much credit for in the past couple of weeks, especially the past couple of weeks, because new Immigration Chiefs can have a fundamental, qualitative impact on the Immigration System. A recent article from the Thai Examiner, that is tthaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: New Immigration Bureau Boss Signals New Orders Police Can Easily Track Down Foreign Suspects in Thailand. There is a lot going on in here. Like with much that comes out of the Thai Examiner, it is a pretty detailed article, a pretty long piece. I urge those who are watching this go check out that article for yourself, again thaiexaminer.com, this is just a small excerpt for this video's purposes. Quoting directly: "Thailand's new Immigration Bureau Chief, Police Lieutenant General Pakpoomphipat Sajjapan is calling for an improved database to keep track of foreigners entering the Kingdom." There is a lot going on in this article and I am going to be deep diving, drilling down into the ramifications of this possibly in some further analysis in further videos. 

Some things to remember just going back in the last, let's call it the last five, six years, we have seen major changes to Immigration Policy. Now some of this stuff and people may believe me, they may not but we saw some of this coming up, there has been a lot of talk I have seen and I have heard from a lot of expats that the current Government when they took over back in 2014 were the ones that were spearheading this. Not true, as I explained in other videos we saw some of the paradigm shifts already occurring before this Government even came online, even came about, which leads me to believe there are some broader policy changes that were at play. That stated, during the last roughly 7 years that we have really watched these major changes in Immigration, in many ways the driving force has often been the Head of Thai Immigration. As we all recall "Big Joke", Surachate "Big Joke" Hakparn, he was a major driver of a lot of major changes: crackdowns, roundups, changes with respect to the rules regarding financial criteria associated with Retirement Visas; I mean a lot of this stuff came about on his watch. Then when he left, when he was no longer Head of Immigration, we had Sompong Chingduang, and it was a change. I really felt it was palpable, there was a change in just the overall paradigm of Immigration and just how they were doing things day to day. Now we are seeing another change here and we are already starting to feel it. When we deal with Thai Immigration we have already seen certain little changes that are coming about and being told that maybe some policies coming down the pike are going to be a little bit different moving forward. Now that said, do I think it is going to be as quite a radical change as we saw under Big Joke compared to the predecessor of him? Probably not. Lieutenant General Sompong Chingduang was a pretty moderate Head of Immigration for lack of a better term. He strove to deal with security and law enforcement issues and I will get into that in a minute because there has been an overall paradigm shift in that direction, but overall he took a bit more of a, how do you put it, not so stringent approach to dealing with this stuff. Meanwhile, the new guy coming on board here, it remains to be seen what we are going to be looking at with respect to him. That said, everything I am reading and everything we are seeing when actually dealing with the Immigration apparatus I am getting the feeling we may be dealing with a more activist Head of Immigration from a policy standpoint than we have dealt with from Immigration in the past couple of years.

Now the whole response to COVID kind of shifted things a little bit insofar as they put a lot of things on hold. I mean there wasn't a lot of Immigration going on the past 18 months but as we see things coming back online, it is going to be interesting to see how the new Head of Immigration responds to more foreigners presumably coming into Thailand here shortly. We are going to be making videos analyzing all of this in the upcoming days and weeks.