Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing ASEAN actually and the notion of a unified ASEAN Visa scheme. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Contradictory Immigration rules handicap common visa hopes. Quoting directly: "There is no coordination of Immigration technologies across the region. Whilst most visitors to Thailand are free and visa exempt, Cambodia and Laos require virtually all international tourists to pay for an e-visa online or risk long delays at airports. Vietnam has a complex Visa system which appears to change details on a regular basis. Myanmar is in a class of its own as it has no International tourism because of the Civil War." 

Now again, I really urge folks in this video to go ahead and read that article in detail if you want any information on the prospects of an ASEAN-wide Visa scheme. Mr. Kenyon - tip of the hat to him down there at Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com - he points out in the analysis of this that, look what I have talked about in other videos myself is look Immigration is its own complex, nuanced web of interests and also it is a real major intersection point - in any country - where local policy, national policy, law and sovereignty all sort of intersect all at once and in an international context. That's a lot of moving parts, so to get even streamlined national Immigration Policy, as we can see here in Thailand with issues like the DTV and provincial recognition regarding extension of those, things like just the ongoing to work authorization - is this work authorized? is that work authorized? do you need to do 90-day reporting? do you not? - again, depending on circumstances and things of this nature. Again, it's difficult to have a streamlined Immigration System to begin with. To try to bring them all together is a Herculean task and I think people do forget that whatever you think in the unification of Europe, setting that aside, the task of doing it especially in an immigration context took years; it took decades if you go back and actually look at it because in certain ways, they were kind of working on it, albeit in certain cases clandestinely, during the Common Market era and such, even though they would say otherwise, "oh no we're not looking to be one unified area", but ultimately that's what ended up happening and you saw certain coordination over the decades leading up to the EU.

So, to think that we would have sort of a unified ASEAN scheme in relatively short order here in Thailand, I'm not necessarily saying it's outside the realm of possibility completely, but it's a bit ambitious to say the least.