Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing what was the Bangkok Field Office and why in my opinion USCIS really needs to re-open the Bangkok Field Office. We used to have a field office here in Bangkok; it was possible for Americans to locally file I-130 petitions for spouses if the American can prove that they were resident in the Consular jurisdiction for a giving period of time. That kind of fluctuated over time, it tended to be a year, that was kind of the prevailing thinking. You needed to be living in Thailand for at least a year to be able to file for those type of benefits. That said, it was something that provided a benefit to Americans here that lived in Thailand or were temporarily based in Thailand and then needed to travel back to the United States. 

Now I understand when they closed the field office in theory, one can do what is called a Direct Consular Filing through the US Consulate at the Embassy. As a practical matter, that's just not going to be really open to most folks unless there's a really cataclysmic emergency, or some very odd set of circumstances. DCFs just aren't routinely done in my experience. It is just not something they particularly want to do. The process is you have to go through Department of Homeland Security first, deal with petition adjudication, get the case over to Department of State and then get the case interviewed out through an Embassy or Consulate outside of the United States. The nice thing about the old Field Office was it dealt with the DHS side and you could deal with it, it usually took a matter of months and then it would move over to the Department of State side, basically go across the street and process through the Consulate there. 

Obviously there are sort of self-serving reasons for this. I was kind of ambivalent in a certain sense when it closed; I guess I shouldn't say I was ambivalent, I mean we did videos on it but I guess I didn't really understand just how major the ramifications were going to be because in the aftermath of this, I've been watching cases now going through the "global" lock box through USCIS, which was supposed to be fast or something, I haven't noticed that especially post-COVID if anything else, everything seems to be slowing down. More to the point, is we have the biggest US Embassy and the biggest, it is my understanding the biggest Embassy in the world in terms of personnel here in Bangkok and one of the few agencies of the United States not represented at the Embassy is USCIS which is the Immigration apparatus, that seems pretty darn odd to me. The fact that you can have liaison officers from all kinds of the Departments in the United States than my opinion would seem to be more pertinent to domestic matters in the United States but I get they have sort of a foreign component, but USCIS, that's what they deal with is Immigration into the United States.

So to my mind, it would make sense to have a USCIS Field Office here in Bangkok, the largest Embassy on the planet and sort of a geographic if you will kind of centre down here in Southeast Asia, to my mind it would make a lot of sense to have that field office re-opened. Now will that ever happen, it remains to be seen. I kind of doubt it but we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.