Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing a recent email I received from someone who is apparently a viewer of this channel.

Every once in a while I like to make these videos. I think it provides some insight to folks out there but as the title dictates, I am not the Thai Government, and here is why I am making this video. I am going to quote from this email. I am not going to name anybody here and I am not going to name place names but I will go ahead and basically quote this as I received it, other than redacting names and redacting place names. Quoting directly: "Dear Sir, I have lived and taught here for over 10 years. I have a Thai wife and I live in a house I designed in (I am going to say a place outside of Bangkok but in Thailand. So more rural place but definitely a place outside of Bangkok. Leave it at that) when are you and your staff going to WAKE UP to the fact that people from the West; Europe, Canada, America and Australia, who are not married to a Thai have to have more income than 90% of Thais to live here. I am fortunate in that I have a Thai wife and a pension of about 70,000 Thai baht. Isn't it better to have unmarried men here spending 100% of their money, 40K plus Thai baht every month and year after year, than a tourist who will spend much more in a month but not be here year after year. Do you realize that I have been advised that over 50,000 such western men have left Thailand because of your rules? Wake up and lower the income that a western unmarried man needs to live here. I agree with you that African and Indians are cheating their way into Thailand and normally are involved in some kind of crime and bribing local police. Best regards, (name redacted)."

Again, let me just say there are some points brought up in this that I think at have policy level probably should be discussed. I am not the Thai Government. I don't work for the Thai Government. I don't set any of the policies inside of Immigration. I have to deal with them. I have made other videos on this topic. I am not trying to be an apologist for the Thai regime. I am simply saying that, we have to deal with these things the way that they are. One point that I might add a little bit of nuance on is tourists versus long stayers. I do think that they did tweak a couple of years back at a policy level some of their thinking with respect to long staying foreigners versus short-term tourists, I think, and this will probably change moving forward, I do think that a decision or perhaps a change in overview occurred probably 18, 24 months ago where they said "we would definitely much rather have volume of tourists than having people necessarily living here that results in a burden on the state or a burden on the local institutions. For this reason, we saw things like the tweak where Insurance became required for a lot of retirees because it was felt that they were kind of burdening the healthcare system. Again, whether you think it is right or wrong, I am not getting into it here. I am just saying I think that there was some thinking.

Again, the Chinese tourism market, really quickly became very dominant in terms of demography with respect to tourism coming to Thailand. In the decade 2010 to 2020, if you went back to 2011 and you asked "who is going to be the top nationality for tourism?" depending on who you talk to it would change but I definitely think Japan would be high on that list but I definitely think most people would say high on that list would be certain Western countries. But now you know China would be the one that they would be looking at first or second definitely with Japan in there and you might even say China, Japan, Korea in some kind of order depending on the year in question. Moving forward, I just think it is going to become China, China, China. They have a number of people, their middle class is growing very rapidly and notwithstanding the COVID situation, that just is what it is. It is sort of baked in to the situation economically. I definitely think yeah there has been a paradigm shift at a policy level regarding long term foreigners, especially Weston foreigners versus who are they going to prioritize you know the volume of Asian, it might not necessarily be Chinese, but Asian tourists to Thailand. Yes they may be getting more priority in a policy sense. 

That said, as concerning as some of these concerns brought up are, again I am not the Thai Government. I don't set these policies. I am making this video, perhaps maybe somebody in the Thai Government, although I highly doubt it, might see this and feel your concerns have some sort of merit and they may do something about it. Unfortunately, and I do receive a number of emails like this, I used this one as an exemplar because there are some that are frankly more hostile that I have received over the time we have done these videos regarding these issues, but I just wanted to go ahead and make this because, I don't make these policies. It is not me. We have to react to them, try to provide some insight where I can. We try to, here the firm, provide some insight for folks for practical usage but long story short I am not the Thai government so it is really not pertinent to bring these issues to me because I can't really do anything about them.