Transcript of the above video:

We are discussing Residency, Permanent Residence and Tax Residence. There is a lot going on in the ether out there, the internet about how Residence works: Golden Visas, Residence by Investment, Citizenship by Investment and quite honestly there is just a lot of gobbledygook out there. I am going to do this from a Thailand-centric standpoint but I will try to say when I am talking about Thailand and when I am talking generally so that people understand the difference.

A lot of people think they have residence in Thailand by dint of having for example their Business Visa. That is not strictly speaking true in the true sense of Residence under Thai Immigration Law. What you have with respect to a Business Visa or a Marriage Visa or a Retirement Visa, is what is called a Non-Immigrant Visa in Thailand. Now it may confer what I would call residence with a little "r" like residence in the sense that you have it you have a right of abode or right to stay in the Kingdom for the period of time in which your Visa is issued but it is not residence in the sense of Permanent Residence. What we are talking about is Lawful Permanent Residence in an American context, we call it Permanent Residence here in Thailand. Permanent Residence is you have a right to live there forever. No matter what you are doing, whether you are maintaining a business for example or Work Permit or not, whether you are married to a Thai or not, whether you are retired or not, you are a PR; you are a Permanent Resident, you are a resident in the Kingdom of Thailand and the only way to take away that residency is basically to put you through proceedings not unlike the United States where they deport you, they strip you of your residence, now you are no longer a resident. In point of fact, that has happened so rarely in Thailand it is almost non-existent from a statistical level. Once you have PR in Thailand, you are a PR, it is basically just done, you are you are here in Thailand permanently. 

That leads us to Tax Residence which tax residence as we have discussed in other videos, if you are physically present in Thailand for 183 days in a given calendar year, you could be considered Tax Resident in the Kingdom and thereby be subject to taxation and that is going to vary depending on circumstances but be subject to tax liability to the Revenue Department here in the Kingdom. Again, that is going to be very circumstantially dependent but again Tax Residence is not the same as Lawful Permanent Residence or Permanent Residence in an Immigration context and neither of them are quite the same as the "residency" you get for the relatively short period of time associated with for example a Business Visa. 

So again there is a difference between these things that I think oftentimes people tend to overlook and oftentimes they can conflate a lot of these concepts and sort of use these terms as if they were synonymous when in fact they are not.