Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Immigration crackdowns. This is a topic we haven't discussed much lo these past about two and a half years going on 3 years now because quite honestly it just wasn't something that was happening, it wasn't considered a priority by Thai Immigration. There were special powers granted under the Emergency Decree for Thai Immigration to provide discretionary waivers, discretionary extensions to remain in Thailand because of the extenuating circumstances in the world so you just didn't see a lot of these crackdowns. But, as I have said in other videos, I think as the Emergency Decree ends we go into hopefully a relatively normal period of time especially compared to the last two and a half years, I think we are probably going to see a sea change with regard to this overall issue. 

In any event, I thought of making this article after reading a recent article from the Nation Thailand, that's nationthailand.com, the article is titled: Police Crackdown on Foreign Fugitives ahead of the Apec Summit. Quoting directly: "Three Chinese Nationals and a Taiwanese man wanted in their home countries have been arrested as part of the latest crackdown, the Immigration Bureau disclosed on Thursday at its Muang Thong Thani office in Nonthaburi province." So yeah, a lot going on here and I urge those who are watching this video, go read that article in detail. You can see kind of who they were looking at, who they were going after. In this case we are talking about foreign criminals I suspect that got kind of picked up in the dragnet that is the APPS system and the PBIC system for those coming into Thailand. I think they noted one of them was an illegal entrant, didn't have any kind of entry documentation at all. Again, not unlike stuff we were seeing going back 3 years ago. 

Now do I think that this is necessarily the precursor to a major overall crackdown on Thai Immigration a la Big Joke going back to like 2018? No not really. I don't think we are in that arena yet. Most notably, 1) Immigration has massively streamlined their overall system. They have biometrics now, they have a number of tools that they did not have going back four or five years ago that the only real kind of solution to the issue was to have crackdowns. Now they've got a lot more tools and they forestall a lot more people from coming into Thailand which now that everything is becoming more digitized, it no longer is analog, they don't have the same number of folks coming in that have sort of problems in their home country with respect to the relevant authorities. So again, things are a little bit different. However something to bear in mind, I think we're probably reverting back to the mean if you will with regard to the paradigm in Thai Immigration. I think Thai Immigration is probably going to look at things more like an enforcement function than they have done the past couple of years while we saw the Emergency Decree discretion being utilized and I think that that is falling by the wayside. So the thing to take away from this video yeah it doesn't look like anything major in terms of crackdowns at the moment but I do think that this may be a ripple on the water and there may be further waves coming if you will.