Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing interviews associated with the naturalization process for Thai citizenship. For those who are unaware, yeah I have actually been through this process myself so I can speak from a great deal of experience; not exactly my favourite thing I have ever done in my life, it was quite a cumbersome process and took quite a bit of time and was pretty stressful quite honestly while you are going through it. I hope that our services here, we assist folks all the time with naturalization, my hope all the time I should say is we provide some level of comfort by having done this before many times ourselves as both the service provider and in my case I oftentimes end up talking to folks about the naturalization process from a place of personal experience. I think that does provide folks with a little bit of peace of mind when they are going through this. That said, I have been through it myself, I get it, piece of mind is difficult to come by when you are going through the overall process. 

That said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Phue Thai asks Government to refrain from transferring officials. The thrust of this article goes in a very different direction. I will sort of circle back to why I thought this was pertinent to this article here in a moment. Quoting directly: "The caretaker Government should maintain the traditional code of ethics and strictly comply with the Constitution by not transferring any of the high level officials, particularly Permanent Secretaries," (that's important, I will get to that in a moment), "for various Ministries while a new Government is in the process of taking over the country's Administration, Phue Thai Party Deputy leader Phumtham Wechayachai said in his statement issued on Friday." Quoting further: "The Permanent Secretaries for all Ministries, in particular, are most important mechanisms for the new government’s administration he said." And that's a fair point and I can say from personal experience, I had to do an interview with the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Interior when I was going through the process of becoming Thai and in fact it was attended not only by him but a number of liaison officers from a multitude of different Ministries. Again, these types of interviews for visas and naturalization, things of this nature, not fun, it is not fun to go through them as an applicant because you are very stressed. I must say it was as pleasant as it could be. The Permanent Secretary himself was quite accommodating, very nice to deal with and the various Ministry liaison folks were polite but that said it is an adjudication and they do question you. I am not going to say they grill you so to speak but they go through the process of doing adjudicatory work and they need to find out information about you and they interrogate you for lack of a better term. Interview is probably a better word but it wasn't very adversarial and I didn't feel like threatened or in any way put under any kind of duress, interview probably is the right word, interrogation maybe too strong a word but they are looking for information and if they find out something about you that operates against you in terms of the overall adjudication, that can lead to your case being denied and again that is a level of stress that most folks are not going to be real interested in going through. 

So the thing to take away from this video, the reason I thought it was important and when I saw that article, yeah the Permanent Secretary is an integral part of the process for getting through the naturalization process, and they do essentially, how do I say this, kind of supervise, or they are integral to the overall Ministry which they are attached to as well. So I am sure that they have various functions throughout the process within the Interior Ministry associated with one's application for citizenship so for that reason, again they are pretty important to the overall process. But I thought of making that video when I read that article and again it seems to be kind of unrelated but I thought it was worth mentioning because I do get questions from time to time about how the citizenship process works and hopefully this video will shed further light on that.