Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Immigration tracking visitors. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, that's thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: New Visa free regime plan for Chinese tourists will see more criminal elements entering Thailand. As per usual, I urge those who are watching this video go check out that article on Thai Examiner, thaiexaminer.com for yourself because there is a lot of good information in there and they are very meticulous. 

Quoting directly under the sort of sub headline if you will: "More resources deployed at airports as Immigration Bureau dusts off COVID era tracking systems to monitor Chinese tourist arrivals from October 1st." So the first thing to note, this is 'COVID era" tracking systems that I thought was interesting which I had a problem with COVID for those who watch this channel especially the government response to it which I thought was massively over the top in many cases internationally both in the United States, sometimes here in Thailand, I thought it reached the point of being rather tyrannical. But now we are also seeing that "oh these tracking systems don't have a singular purpose." Quoting further: "Police Major General Panthana also explained that the Immigration Bureau was updating its database tracking facilities and planned to deploy a system, with some modifications, used for the Phuket Sandbox initiative during the COVID-19 crisis which together with data furnished by incoming tourists, allows the Immigration Bureau to track visitors more effectively throughout the Kingdom." So yeah, and I would posit that virtually every Government around the world is probably rolling out similar protocols, not that that is a good thing. In fact, I really have serious problems with the Orwellian places that this is taking us. But it is noteworthy that yes Immigration does have tools on hand to be able to track the folks that are coming into the Kingdom. 

As we have noted in prior videos in the past, for example places like Japan and Korea are quite assiduous at ascertaining whether or not folks are in fact working illegally in their countries or whether or not they are overstaying. And as we have seen here recently from Immigration here in Thailand, the ability to both ascertain an overstayer and go ahead and apprehend them has increased dramatically especially since we have seen the reopening of the Kingdom to foreign tourism going back or full foreign tourism I should say, unfettered tourism might be the right word, back in October of 2022. So getting to almost a year on from that, we are seeing that these tracking tools remain within the sort of repertoire if you will of the Immigration Authorities and they are in fact using them. So it will be interesting to see whether or not we will see an increase in apprehensions of overstayers, possibly folks working illegally, things of that nature, it will be interesting to see if that increases as time moves forward.