Transcript of the above video:

For those who have watched this channel for number of years, and on one level I feel bad for you if you have because a lot of this news is kind of dry but it is pertinent and I do appreciate when folks tell me, "hey we really appreciate you putting out the news on this stuff" and I like doing it. 

For those who have watched this channel for a prolonged period of time, you will remember the phrase "Good Guys in, Bad Guys Out". That was sort of promulgated a few years back within Thai Immigration and it actually is a pretty good, how do we call it, kind of moniker if you will for the paradigm of Thai Immigration presently. As I have discussed in other videos in the past, Thai Immigration had much more of an administrative paradigm if you will rather than an enforcement paradigm which is what Thai Immigration presently has and I think this "good guys in, bad guys out" notion goes to sort of show that. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Phuket News, that is thephuketnews.com, the article is titled: Ukrainian man arrested at Phuket airport, charged for 114 days of overstay. I urge those who are watching this video go check out that article in detail. The excerpt I am going to quote here goes to the issue of "good guys in, bad guys out", so if you want to read more details on that story, I urge you to go to the Phuket News and read that for yourself. That said, quoting directly: "According to Immigration Bureau regulations, the fine for overstaying is 500 Baht per day. However, the "Good Guys in, Bad Guys out" policy implemented in 2016, stipulates that foreigners arrested for an overstay of less than one year will be deported and blacklisted from re-entering the country for 5 years. Those arrested for an overstay of more than one year will face deportation and a 10 year re-entry ban." 

So yeah that policy regarding arrest, if you are even on one day of overstay, if you are arrested and apprehended in Thailand that can lead to a blacklisting of five years; even a day, if you are arrested. As I discussed in another video made contemporaneously with this one, Thai Immigration seems to be taking a more proactive stance with regard to this and they are actually going after people in the airport. At one time I kind of viewed the airport myself as being you are sort of 'Home Free'; once you get there; you pay your fine, you're done with it. No, Thai Immigration it looks like is taking a more aggressive posture on this and we are seeing people arrested at the airport. This is the second one of these I have read from the Phuket News on this channel regarding the arrest of somebody at the airport. 

That's very uncommon. If you look back in the past, that just was not routinely done. It looks like more and more Immigration enforcement is starting to do that. So again, this whole "good guys in, bad guys out" and it has two components to it: one, is this enhanced enforcement, the other thing is look as we have discussed in other videos, things like Permanent Residence applications are much more efficiently processed than times past and that is an example of sort of the "good guys in" sort of mentality associated with this whole Immigration thing. But at the same time, more to the point and something you are going to see more often I think, is the ‘bad guys out’ side where we see this proactive approach from Thai Immigration taking much more an enforcement operation rather than simply being sort of administrators just stamping people in and out of Thailand at an Immigration checkpoint.