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US Visas Thailand: The Impact Of COVID On Thai American Couples

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing this in an Immigration context but I am trying to put a human element on to the Immigration situation. 

So long story short you know COVID-19 or I should say the response worldwide to COVID-19, has had a tremendous impact on travel. Nowhere was this more felt than amongst bi-national couples who were separated by great distances when the international travel system came to an abrupt halt roughly a year prior to the making of this video. 

A recent article from Khao Sod English, khaosodenglish.com, the article is titled: Bitter Valentine - COVID Complicates Thai Foreigner Long Distance Love. Quoting directly: "Make It or break It- alas with the global epidemic ripping into tatters well made plans and promises, not every couple can last till death do them part. The difficult of long distance relationships, the uncertainty of not knowing when they can meet again and the stress can prove too much. Even the founder of "Love not Tourism Group" ended her own relationship during the pandemic." There is a lot in this article. Again Bitter Valentine COVID Complicates Thai Foreigner Long Distance Love, khaosodenglish.com. I urge folks to check out that article. There is a lot of insight in there. The reason I am quoting this and I would like to know ‘Love Not Tourism’, that is a group. They started trending on Twitter. We actually tweeted with that hashtag a little bit some months ago talking about US and Thai Immigration. Again it is a group of folks that have been separated by geographic distance from their significant others as a result of the travel restrictions imposed by COVID and it is definitely a sad state of affairs.

I wanted to make this video because I wanted to say two things. First of all, hopefully some of these travel restrictions getting eased are going to bring people together. I really, I haven't really even wanted to make a video until now because candidly it has been hard to watch, especially some of my clients. Now they have pretty well all come through now here at the beginning of the year especially after Biden came into office but some of my clients that were just getting ready to go into their K-1 interview, back in March 2020 or just getting ready to go into their Immigrant Spouse Visa interview and then bam! COVID just knocked them out of the box. There wasn't any way to do anything. We got a couple people in back in October that had already just basically gotten up to the finish line and then Biden came in and it was like flipping a switch. We have definitely seen a deluge coming through in an Immigration context. 

Long story short and I am going to wrap up this video but that is one thing, it has just been really terrible to watch. Another thing is an upshot to this is I have yet to see any of our bi-national clients that retained us and have been working with us throughout the K-1 and the Immigrant Visa process, unless I am mistaken, I haven't seen anybody's relationship fall apart as a result of this wait. And that is not to say that a relationship falling apart because of this is something wrong because candidly I cannot imagine going through this stuff. It would be tough on really some of the hardest people; some of the hard or toughest psyche out there but in a way it has kind of forged a lot of these relationships. If they went into this as iron, they are coming out as cold rolled steel because just being together after all of this is said and done, will be in and of itself something of a privilege.