Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing so-called “High Skill” Visas, “High Skill Professionals”, however you want to look at this. This is kind of a euphemism for one of the subcategories under what is being termed the Thai Long Term Residence Visa which again as many of the folks that watch these video, it is a bit of a broken record at this point but it is not a Visa that confers residence. It is being called that, it is a bit of a misnomer. It is a Visa that confers long-term status in Thailand, 10 years is our understanding, but it does not confer Lawful Permanent Residence in Thailand, that is a different category of immigration documentation.

The High Skill Professional, I've got some notes here, I apologize for reading in front of the camera but High Skill professionals, they are looking for folks in certain targeted industries. There is sort of a list of these, I am not going to go through all of that in this video but there are certain things that they are trying to target with this. A major question on a lot of people's lips is what are the financial requirements. You have got to have a personal income of no less than $80,000 per year for the past 2 years. Now there are some exceptions; in a sense there is kind of a secondary way to dealing with this. If your income is not below $40,000 but it doesn't get to the level of $80,000, it may still be possible to get one of these visas but you have got to have a background of at least a Master's Degree or higher in some kind of what appears to be a stem field, so science or technology, engineering, mathematics, although I don't know about mathematics, it seems to be science and tech are kind of what they are looking for. Again, this hasn't been rolled out yet so some of this is speculation. We don't exactly know what this is actually going to look like in practice. I am just trying to do this video to provide some insight into what we are looking at because this is going to come online in the upcoming weeks. The person that goes for this has to have sort of like specialized expertise in highly skilled profession and again I have said this in another video, the certification, the devil's going to be in the details here in how this is certified because there's a lot of nebulous concepts especially associated with these so-called professional category visas as opposed to the retiree category visas. Again they seem to be encouraging folks coming into Government Agencies because there's no sort of set minimum requirements for those who are going to work for a Thai Government Agency. There is a requirement of insurance coverage of $50,000 that has got to be maintained throughout the person's Visa status here in Thailand so you have got to maintain $50,000 in insurance coverage here in Thailand. Again, they want experience so there seems to be again like this 5-year requirement with respect to long-term experience in one of these targeted fields. 

Again how the rubber hits the road on that remains to be seen. How exactly that's going to play out; what exactly we're looking at in terms of how they are going to determine, “is it a targeted industry? are you highly skilled?”, we just don't know that at this time so there's an element of speculation that goes into this. We are certainly going to keep people updated on this because I think it is going to be very interesting in the upcoming probably two or three months where we actually start seeing these visas come online and I hope I am going to be able to provide some insight into some of the more nuanced aspects of the certification process associated with this Visa.