Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing illegally working in Thailand. When I came up with the title our producer of these videos said, “A deep dive? Like 'how to’ work illegally in Thailand?' I said, "no, that is not what we are talking about."  

I thought of making this view after reading a recent comment on a prior video that we did on working illegally in Thailand, quoting directly from the comment: "There was an infamous arrest of foreigners a number of years ago at an open mic night in Chiang Mai." That kind of caused me to go down the rabbit hole where I went and I went ahead and looked this up. This article was posted on Chiang Mai City Life. Now bear in mind, this is from May 30th, 2011, so this is over a decade ago but I think provides some insight even now. Quoting directly: Chiang Mai's fledgling music scene has suffered a setback of late due to the crackdown on foreign musicians playing live music in the city."  Quoting further from that: "The arrest, which the Immigration Police have said were an action against people working without requisite work permits." So I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article in detail, I am just quoting this to get into the fact that musicians have always kind of been something of a gray area with regard to working in Thailand. Obviously Thais can be live musicians in Thailand no problem, but when it comes to foreigners coming here and like working at a bar as a musician, that has always been something of a gray area even going back a decade ago. The thing to take away from this video and understand is these gray areas leave one more open if you will, to negative scrutiny. By that I mean scrutiny that can end up with a legal citation and arrest or even a deportation. This isn't a new thing; this isn't a new phenomenon. Thai Immigration Officials, Thai Employment Office officials are very cognizant of the fact that the labour pool in Thailand, to my mind the thinking is it needs to be insulated because otherwise there could just be this rush of foreign nationals coming here, engaging in work that has traditionally been undertaken by Thais and thereby put those locals out of work. That is a very big concern and again, as this Chiang Mai City Life article goes into, this has been a concern going back into 2011 and before and I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

So the thing to understand, if you are coming to Thailand, you want to live here, you want to work here, go ahead and make sure you are in proper lawful status, get your work authorization in order and then you don't have to worry about these concerns.