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As the title of this video suggests, we are asking, "Have Thai Visas been languishing for over half a decade?" The reason for asking that question, I was reading an article in the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com. It is a good article for those of you who are interested; you should go and check it out. I am going to quote a little except here. The article is titled: Retirement no mere snooze. Quoting directly: "Meanwhile, Thailand has been languishing pushing for the better part of over half a decade trying to introduce a Visa option for the ever-growing remote work community." The point of the article seemed to be retirees have problems maintaining status, kind of a cumbersome system and then also you know it was kind of talking about encouraging certain types of foreign workers to come in and do business here in Thailand. 

My argument to that is it really conveys to me something of a lack of a real deep understanding of the Thai Immigration system. Quite honestly, I won't say it's easy but it is relatively straightforward especially compared to other jurisdictions in this region. It is relatively straightforward for foreign nationals to come in, set up a Company and use that Company as a vehicle to maintain long-term Business Visas and work authorization status. On top of this, for American citizens, there is the added bonus of the provisions of the US- Thai Treaty of Amity which allows Americans to come into Thailand and set up their Company's virtually 100%, 100% ownership, notwithstanding the provisions of the Foreign Business Act.

So what I would say is there are currently B Visa options out there and it is a relatively, again I may think it is straightforward because I deal with it all the time, and we usually have our clients from set up, from the time they talk to us till the time we are pretty well done with it, six weeks or so we can have folks in Thailand, depending on circumstances, it all depends on circumstances. Usually a couple of months we can have folks in Thailand; Business Visas, Work Permits, maybe sometimes even less. If they are in Thailand we may be able to affect a conversion, again circumstances depending but I don't really think it is fair to say that the Thai Immigration System has “languished” and frankly a lot of the "improvements", things like Smart Visas haven't really applied to a broad amount of possible foreign investors. Quite frankly I think that there is a lot of opportunity in the Thai Immigration system already. To some extent, I won't say everything in the Thai Immigration system is hunky-dory, I mean there are things that could change; that can be said for any Immigration system quite frankly including the US, a lot of improvements could be made in there. Long story short there are a lot of opportunities within the Immigration system for foreign nationals to come to Thailand and do business on a long-term basis.