Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Immigration policy and Law. I started thinking about this after reading a recent article in the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Liberal Immigration Policies Needed. Quoting directly: "I can understand that we cannot go back to the days when people migrated freely across the globe. However it should be possible to devise more liberal Immigration policies to allow more people into the country without creating National Security threats. Thailand for instance could allow in immigrants liberally from neighboring countries to meet its labour needs. These immigrants could provide labour that serves not only the industrial and construction sectors but other labor intensive economic and social sectors such as health and geriatric care as well."

A pretty good article and in fact the thrust of this article is more about demographics. The article talks about how Thailand's birth rate has gone down rather significantly over the past roughly 40, 50 years and it has created a situation where migrant labour is often times needed to fill a void with respect to the need for labour in the country to get things done; to operate businesses, construction for example is mentioned. So the point I kind of want to make with this video is okay liberality perhaps, although I often times find it is not necessarily; opening up the floodgates may not be the best policy. What I think would maybe behoove folks that are dealing with the immigration system because anybody that has gone through it and in any country for that matter, the United States Immigration system has issues of its own. Thailand's though more than anything, it is a lack of certainty. The rules seem to be, especially regulations, the law has not changed since '79 but the regulations and the enforcement, there can be pretty dramatic paradigm shifts with respect to those issues with respect to regulations and enforcement and it can have a tremendous practical impact on folks that are trying to live and work in Thailand. 

So my suggestion might be perhaps liberality is not necessarily what one should be looking for but perhaps more certainty with respect to the application and how rules are.  I have often said it; people can deal with good rules, people can deal with bad rules. What they have a hard time dealing with is uncertain rules where they just don't know how to maintain lawful status. It may be a number of hoops you have to jump through to maintain lawful status but if you are certain in the knowledge of what those hoops are, that may be a better method of in this case seeing more migratory labour come in because okay there are multiple hoops but if you know that after jumping through the hoops you are going to end up with your visa status or your work authorization then you can do that but if it constantly is in a state of flux, that can be very problematic.