Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well Immigration discretion. I am just going to jump right in so we can get to the analysis. I thought of making this video after reading a recent excerpt in an article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Pattaya Grapevine: Immigration Melody, under the subheading of: Discretion is the key. Quote: "Since the 2014 coup, individual Immigration Offices appear to have used a lot more local discretion. Exactly what documents you need for particular extensions and whether a Certificate of Residence can be issued in English, are all matters which differ up and down the country. In other words plant bargaining (to a limited extent) has grown apace. The old advice of "ask locally" has never been more true."

Well, yeah, I would say fair enough on that. There is discretion and discretion has been used since 2014 but I don't think the coup was a major demarcation point in analyzing any changes in Immigration discretion. If anything I would argue Immigration was using more discretion prior to '14 especially if you go back into 2008, '09, '10 when you used to have what was called the, it was the 90/90 rule, you had the 1, 2, 3. You could do border runs for, 30 day, 30 day, 30 day and then if you wanted to come back in using Border Runs you had to get a Tourist Visa and then you could kind of revert back. Then they stopped wanting people to do that and then they kind of cracked down on Tourist Visas; that I believe was prior to 2014. And as we discussed in videos, this is going back 5, 6 years from this video going back into the changeover in Governments that occurred in 2014, we were already seeing Immigration Policy changes being implemented prior to the change in Government. I don't think the Immigration apparatus' evolution has been overly impacted by what happened in 2014. If anything, I think it kind of naturally evolved.

Now that were a couple of developments, most notably the really heavy restrictions and tightening up under "Big Joke", that may not have happened. It is hard to discern what would have, "would have, could have, should have"; what would have happened had things been different in 2014 but I don't really think that we have seen any kind of increase or decrease in discretion. If anything, I think overall, Immigration's policies kind of evolve naturally and I don't think it had anything to do with what happened in 2014.