Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing a clear path to residency in Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from CNBC that is cnbc.com, the article is titled: Southeast Asia's worst-performing stock market is UBS's 'top pick'. It is kind of an interesting article, a lot going on in there. I urge folks who are watching this video, go check that out but we are quoting an excerpt, it doesn't really go to the thrust of the overall article, quoting directly: "However, Thailand may have to first change its Immigration Policy. Even after foreign workers have been in Thailand for many years, they are "still considered as migrants and not... part of the local population," he explained. Thailand should consider providing migrants with a clear path to residency, he added."

Yeah, they are talking specifically about migrant workers coming over the borders. There is a lot of migrant labour from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, even Malaysia down on the southern border and sort of providing a clear path to residency. Thailand, it's an interesting thing because it seems to me there is always this kind of balancing between the maintenance of cultural heritage in Thailand and the maintenance of the Thai culture itself up against concerns about for example as this article goes into some detail, concerns about demography especially moving forward and just concerns about Immigration Policy. 

What I would say is Thailand does have, especially in the past few years regarding migrant labour, Thailand does have a pretty straightforward method of living and working in Thailand if one is a migrant labourer. Now a lot of these laws also kind of concurrently cover what I would call Farang labour, Western foreigners if you will and that is kind of a different story. If you are not a country that directly, I would look at sort of the migration rules and laws as sort of triple ringed. So there's the ring of countries that border Thailand directly which Thailand has a number of like Memoranda of Understanding regarding migration and work authorization for those folks so that is sort of one ring. The next concentric ring is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, so other countries in ASEAN may have some free movement of labour into Thailand so long as it doesn't violate certain restricted occupations and things, they can interact with Thailand in a little bit different manner. Then you sort of have the rest of the world. Now admittedly, my sort of bias is from the Anglo-sphere side of the world but the thing to take away from this video and the thing to understand is yeah work authorization I don't think that is going anywhere for a while, although again paths to real residency kind of remains to be seen. I think it could happen but it is going to take some time most notably because there would have to be some kind of law promulgated that would either replace, supersede or amend the Immigration Act of 1979 and that is going to take some doing.

Immigration is always a hot button topic in a political context, you can say the same thing for the United States as here in Thailand. So yeah, while on one hand I think a path to residency could be a good thing especially for certain types of workers, I don't think it's prudent to expect that to happen anytime in the relatively near future.