Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing new facilities at Thai Immigration. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: New Suvarnabhumi airport terminal on track for September opening. Quoting directly: "Mr Kerati said the AoT also plans to tackle overcrowding at the airport's passport control area by installing Auto Channel Machines for inbound passengers from Singapore and Hong Kong next year. In the future, the service will be extended for outbound passengers with e-passports from 90 countries, he said." So, interesting. 

So this notion of e-passports, I don't know what that means precisely but I would presume it is some kind of biometric readable passport that is easier to pass through an Immigration checkpoint. Meanwhile, these Auto Channel Machines already coming into effect for folks coming in from Hong Kong and Singapore. I would imagine that would greatly decrease the amount of congestion you have when coming through the Immigration checkpoint which would be conducive to further tourism; it is just one less hassle someone has to deal with. Nothing worse than coming off of a major long flight and then having to sort of get up and slog through Immigration, it's just no fun at all. 

So the thing to understand and the thing to take away from this video, as this technology improves 1) it will make things more efficient but also note it also means that look there is going to be a lot of efficiency with regard to Immigration enforcement as well so those that have previous overstays and things are likely to find themselves in an automated setting where they might just get found inadmissible just automatically. It might not be a situation where you are dealing with even an actual person; you might just come up to a checkpoint and you get a big red stop sign instead of a green check mark or whatever. Again, the implications of this stuff I think reasonable people, in fact I think reasonable people ought to be, I was about to say "reasonable people can disagree on it" but I think reasonable people ought to be concerned about this because the technology has the capability of having some pretty bad applications in terms of being able to control people and sort of manipulate them. But setting that aside, this is coming and it looks like it is going to be something that will on the one hand at least, dramatically increase efficiency of processing of inbound foreign nationals into the Kingdom of Thailand.