Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question has sort of the visa bureaucracy if you will failed to pinpoint folks who are of concern to the Thai Immigration System. So I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Thailand on the way to becoming a visa-free zone for foreign holiday makers. As they note, the title is a little bit hyperbolic but many of the countries from whence many of the tourists to Thailand originate, have effectively gone to Visa-free, at least for the forthcoming high season. As noted in a prior video, China and Russia now effectively have a Visa-free option in order to enter Thailand. The West, Europe etc., they have always had that option for the most part, but clearly Thailand is expanding. There is even talk in that article that it may be expanded to Indian nationals as well moving forward. So we will keep you updated on that as it evolves; for now apparently that has not come to pass.

I thought of making this video after reading the following quote. Quoting directly, again Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com: "Defending the virtual collapse of visas for tourism and visitors, Srettha's spokespersons," that is Srettha the Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister, "Srettha's spokespersons have said that Immigration Police feel they can effectively monitor foreigners post-arrival and that the traditional visa bureaucracy often failed to pinpoint miscreants in any case. During the post-2014 coup administration, there were many scandals involving Chinese and Russian nationals in particular, such as illegal working as taxi drivers and tour guides in Phuket and enrollment at language schools in several cities without the required paperwork." You know it is interesting though that they bring that up because that only leads me to believe that we could very well see more Immigration enforcement activity moving forward and we have. As we have noted in other videos, the digitization of Thai Immigration's tools, their database, their ability to cross reference different databases now, most notably address reporting and Visa expiration, has resulted in a lot of spot checks by Thai Immigration. We have done a number of videos, apparently Phuket, it is very lively for that right now. The Thai Immigration Office down there has been conducting a number of spot checks utilizing the database to ascertain whether or not someone has overstayed and there have been a number of overstayers detained and deported. 

The point I am trying to make here is yeah, perhaps the system in the past was not optimal for targeting folks that were in Thailand illegally but something that should be kept in mind moving forward is the situation is improving. I would even argue the system is improving on a day-to-day basis. It is getting better as each day goes along. Now for folks that are looking to stay in Thailand in overstay, that is probably not good news because the result is again more enforcement and more effective enforcement. That said, how exactly this plays out over the coming weeks and months remains to be seen but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as that situation evolves.