If you follow my stuff you will know that I have lived in Thailand for a long time and for the most part I think it is one of the best places to live on the planet, particularly up in the north where the weather is cooler and the population is large enough to facilitate plenty to do but not so big that getting around is possible.
The people are nice, the crime is low (despite the fact that the police are nearly useless), and the food is excellent and varied. Basically it is an awesome place, except for one aspect of it.
Visas
They really seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to live here for the long-term. On one side of the coin they are really pushing for foreign investment but what they really want you do do is spend a crap-ton of money and then get the hell out of here. That is not an official opinion by any means but some information has leaked in the past about the Tourism Authority pushing for short-term "desirable" tourists.
They briefly seemed to embrace digital nomads like myself but unfortunately that was short-lived. It becomes increasingly difficult to remain here as time goes by. Currently, in order to have a long-term visa I attend a martial arts school and even though I actually do attend every class, and participate in all events, we still have to be coached for our trip to immigration to renew our visas every 3 months.
This includes making sure we "have our stories straight" about what goes on in the classroom. I don't really understand this because I know what happens in the classroom because I am there every time, perhaps this is just because there are a number of students who don't attend. Then I have to know other students names and that is just silly since I interact with the instructors, not so much the other students. We are not pals outside of the classroom.
There is a also a absurd amount of paperwork that must be copied several times and each page of it needs to be signed by me.
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The above picture is an exaggeration but trust me when I say that it is excessive. The most frustrating part about it is something I have mentioned in the past and that is that these documents are not used for anything, the aren't even referenced or stored, yet they have to be submitted every time. (There was a time in the past where I needed to access the documents that I had presented to Immigration in order to ammend them and I went to immigration to retrieve them only to discover that they had no idea where my documents are.)
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I love this country but I suppose you could say that I dread interaction with the officials who run it. Tomorrow will be my first time renewing my latest visa in my new city. Let's hope that I can remember all the scripted answers that I have been told to memorize.
I am on an ed visa as well.
Had my renew done around 2 months ago and spend over 8 hours at the immigartion.
Was grat fun and I am soo looking forward to do it again next month
yeah. i love it so much when i deal with immigration. Look forward to it a lot
Damn it is such a hazel to renew the visa. Carrying all such documents is headache too.
Hope you'll get your renewal easily.
my follow-up article sheds some light on this renewal and it was much better than I thought it would be.
I will read it then!
I feel the same way, but trying to get access to my own money to start a business. It's absurd all the hoops you have to jump through and scrips you have to memorize just to transfer my own money from one place to another so I can use it to invest in a business I'm starting.
Thanks for sharing some of the process and headaches though. I'd like to eventually travel more with my family if I can ever afford to quit my job and I'm sure long term visas is the headache I'm going to have to learn about when looking into this.
I can't recommend enough that you seriously consider not opening a business in Thailand unless you or your partner are Thai. The system is designed for you to fail.
I would just be looking at extended vacations for my family to different places. I think a lot of countries are set-up so that outsiders fail. I know canada has a bunch of restrictions and "penalties" for even US citizens coming in an doing work in Canada which is ridiculous, but whatever.
many people used to come here for a year long vacation and never work or if they did work it would be something digital that doesn't involve the Thai country and is in no way impacting their work-force. These people were normally pretty "high-rollers" too staying at houses or villas that are thousands of dollars a month. These type of people are being forced out as well.
I don't really know what they are going for with this, but the Thai government just like any other government gets to do whatever they way. However, since Thailand's GDP is 20% based on tourism (this is a huge number) and the surrounding countries are growing in popularity, Thailand could end up regretting taking a hard-line approach to the expat community.
Yeah, who knows what some governments do and why they do it. I've given up. Probably something to do with in the name of protecting our citizens from x we're doing y.
Didn't realize Thailand economy was that focused or tied to tourism.
I really don't understand why some countries are treating foreigners like that. I understand they want to protect their borders and stop immigration as it can have very bad effects but people who have their papers in order, have justification for staying in the country, should be treated with respect and welcomed. Looks like they need another decade or two to learn. Good luck and keep up informed :)