Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the notion of a standardized Immigration procedure throughout ASEAN. Recently the Prime Minister here in Thailand has been talking a lot about some sort of Pan-ASEAN Visa, a Schengen-style Visa if you will. What is Schengen?

In Europe there is a group of countries that have all agreed that they will have like a shared area in which folks can come and go, travel freely once they go through the Schengen visa  process. So you go through the Schengen visa process with one of the countries in the Schengen area, you arrive in that Schengen Area country and then you can go anywhere else in the Schengen area once you have arrived. There seems to be some discussion here at least at the national level here in Thailand, about creating something similar throughout ASEAN. As I've discussed in videos made contemporaneously with this one, while I think it's possible in the longer term, I think it is very unlikely that this is anywhere near imminent.

That said, I thought about making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Visa differences impede progress towards a Schengen-style south east Asia. Quoting directly: "Marisa Sukosol Nunbakdi, a past president of the Thai Hotels Association, said any common Visa would need to be 90 days, not 30 or 60, to reach its international potential. Thitian Pongsudhirak, a professor at Chulalongkorn University, stressed that standardized Immigration procedures throughout the region were very rare." Well yeah. 

Again, Immigration is an interesting thing. It has a component of law enforcement; it has a component of law; its authority is derived from law and it has a component dedicated to National Security as well of the given nation state in which it operates. For this reason, I don't think that scenario augers particularly well for the creation of an ASEAN-wide visa because all of these different Immigration Authorities have different mandates and have different priorities of what they consider important in terms of the National Security of their given countries as well as the relevant law pertaining to Immigration, as well as the relevant procedures that they undertake. We see problems already here in Thailand where different Immigration Officers deal with things differently in an administrative capacity. Imagine trying to take that region wide with all of the different peccadillos and proclivities that different Immigration Offices are going to have throughout different countries, throughout a vast, sprawling, geographical area and totally differing concepts of the rule of law throughout all these different jurisdictions. 

So do I think it's possible we may see some standardized procedures? Yeah maybe down the road but as noted in that article, it's already very rare and I don't see it happening with any kind of regularity in the future any time soon.