Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing issues re-entering Thailand. The reason I got to think of this is I saw a video, not a video on article on worldofbuzz.com, it was titled: "He had no proof of leaving 5 years ago." - held at Thai Immigration checkpoint, M'sian Man's Story Goes Viral. There are just a few bullet points here; those who are watching this, you may want to go check this out for yourself but I'll go ahead and quote some of this. 

-"On Thursday 7 July, Jordan wanted to visit Dannok, Thailand for a short getaway. 

-When he was about to enter the Immigration checkpoint at Sadao, Thailand, he was told to wait. 

-The Immigration officer took his passport and went into his office. 

-After 30 minutes, the Immigration Officer came out and told him that they found a record of him entering Thailand on September 2, 2017. 

-The system showed that he did not 'leave' Thailand and that would mean that he has been 'illegally' in Thailand for 5 years."

Now it should be noted, this person is visiting from Malaysia. This person is already out of Thailand so he is on the other side of the line if you will. This isn't somebody living in Thailand leaving, it is my understanding, so okay. Again, he was about to enter the Immigration checkpoint at Sadao, Thailand, he was coming into Thailand.

“Due to language barriers, a man possibly a tour guide was helping him to translate. The Officer left as he explained that he had other matters to attend to.” Quoting further: "The man asked if he had his old passport with him or if he could call anyone from his family to help prove there was a record of him leaving." 

It gets further in there and basically they go back and forth. Ultimately they don't find that he had not left because clearly he had left but it became this kind of catch-22 sort of back and forth, coming in and out. Yeah, this can be something of an issue. 

Going back, the digital system that now is pretty much in wide use in Thailand, was still kind of being rolled out even if you go back four or five years ago, it was not fully online. So yeah I could see where there would be record discrepancies. Now that said, to me I mean from a commonsensical approach, if someone is trying to enter Thailand, and you are worried about whether or not they left before, well that's pretty clear. I mean they are trying to re-enter so at some point they left, one would think. Now that being said, Thai Immigration does have protocols they need to deal with and security issues they need to deal with. People forget that. Immigration isn't just an administrative thing, there are security protocols and it does probably look pretty strange that somebody came in and there is no record of them leaving. Now as they get further down in that article they find that yeah, he had proof from another passport that he had left. But long story short it was interesting that this became a major issue and it caused such a snafu for this person. 

So the thing to take away from this video, one, I hesitate to say you should always take your old passports with you but it's not an absolutely terrible idea, I mean if you can. Again I think that this is a pretty anomalous story. Let me be clear, this is not something that Immigration is doing frequently. The reason I am mentioning this in this video is because it is an anomaly. I had just never heard of this and when I read it I felt like it was noteworthy to make a video on. So those folks out there that are afraid of coming to Thailand for fear that if you don't have your exit stamp you are going to have a problem, I highly doubt it. I think it was just a situation where it just kind of got caught in the mechanism if you will of Thai Immigration and they finally got through it but it just was a strange anomaly to the Immigration Officer and then this person is trying to get in, it just created kind of an overall kind of unpleasant situation. But long story short, yeah it was ultimately resolved, but something to think about with respect to travel is if you've got documentation there as to prior travel, it might not be a terrible idea to maintain that documentation so as not to have that issue in the future.