Transcript of the above video: 

I have been dealing with US Immigration Law for going on 17 years now. I have also had dealings with Thai Immigration Law for years as well in both a personal and subsequently a professional capacity, as I actually naturalized to Thai citizenship some six years ago. So I have personally have been through sort of the bowels of the Thai Immigration system if you will and come out the other end. And then, since that time, since I have been Thai, I have assisted a number of people over the years in matters pertaining to Thai and American Immigration aspects of both. 

I thought of making this video and it's more broad; we usually only talk about other jurisdictions with regard to Immigration in this area, in Southeast Asia but I thought this was worth making a video. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Visa differences impede progress towards a Schengen-style south east Asia. Quoting directly: "Meanwhile, Schengen style agreements are doing better elsewhere. As noted in that article, and we have discussed this in other videos, I just don't think ASEAN is overly conducive to the notion of sort of a Pan-ASEAN single visa scheme, at least not right now, and I have discussed that at length in other videos. Go check out those videos on our channel for more information. Quoting further: "The Gulf Cooperation Council - comprising the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait - currently requires separate e-visas. But a Grand Tours Visa is expected to be available by the end of 2024 and travel companies are expected to launch packages covering several Mid-East countries once implemented. A similar common visa initiative covering five southern African countries spreading across massive nature reserves, is expected to popularize tourist attractions such as exotic wildlife and spectacular waterfalls." Yeah interesting. These sort of pan-regional visas can be extremely useful. I think where Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia for that matter, may have missed the bus or missed the boat on this I think these jurisdictions became, I am not saying that countries in the Middle East or Africa are unsophisticated per se, what I am saying is their Immigration apparatuses are probably not all that sophisticated because quite honestly, probably the demand for going to those places, so the volume of tourists going in, was probably not high and has not been overly high, maybe UAE being a major exception to that, Bahrain, Qatar as well, they do see a lot of in and out activity. Saudi for that matter too and maybe even Kuwait to some extent but again we are not talking about the massive volumes that you see over here in Thailand. So for example, Thailand's Immigration system became very sophisticated out of the necessity, as did Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, some of these other countries here because over time, there were a lot of travelers - business and otherwise - tourists etc. that came here to Southeast Asia so each nation built up their own Immigration apparatus. Once those sort of bureaucracies are in place, it is very difficult to get them to cooperate. 

Now that said, cutting over to the Middle East and Africa, I could see scenarios moving forward where yeah, there would be more cooperation regionally amongst those countries compared to Southeast Asia because they just haven't built up quite the apparatus that these jurisdictions have and so they are probably a bit more conducive to cooperation.