The End of the Thailand Visa Run

New visa regulations in the Land of Smiles may put a frown on the faces
of thousands of long term residents.

BANGKOK: -- Jay thought that his life as an English teacher in Bangkok
was set. There were few hassles with authority, other than traveling
off to the Cambodia border once a month to pick up a new Thai entry
stamp for his passport.

Now Jay may have to change his lifestyle dramatically. He has stopped
decorating his apartment and is unlikely to buy any more furniture,
after new immigration regulations upended what he and thousands of
other foreigners had taken for granted -- that the monthly
"visa-run" could keep them in Thailand indefinitely.

Agencies, which bought plush buses and minivans for visa-run packages
sold to people like Jay, are bracing for a sharp drop in business over
the coming months. "The customer, which is the basis of the business,
is gone or they will find another way to stay in Thailand. I think
every company will have to cut down from two buses a day to one a day
or one every other day," says Claudio Mattioli, operator of Sawasdee
Transport in Bangkok.

New immigration rules are intended to stop people like Jay using border
stamps and tourist visas to live and work here, ending so-called grey
migration, mostly from developed countries, and turfing out a growing
criminal fraternity. While the aims are laudable, the dragnet might
prove to be an own goal for the economy. Legitimate small businesses
are more easily drawn to the rational structure in Singapore while
neighboring Cambodia is happy to grant multiple entry business visas to
anybody with $25. The legions of itinerant - but solvent - long
term visitors in Thailand could soon be packing up.

In September, after three years of thinking it over, the immigration
department announced that from October it would only allow foreigners
without visas to visit for no more than a cumulative three months in
any six month period. Airlines risk fines if passengers without
confirmed return tickets are denied entry at immigration because their
three month allowance is up.

Immigration officers are directing those who have used up their three
months to apply for visas at a Thai embassy. Passports full of visa
exemption stamps and a handful of tourist visas may not fair well
though. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which determines visa policy,
has advised its consuls to use more discretion when considering tourist
visa applications.

Living and working on 30-day stamps and tourist visas has been feasible
because changes in policy and technology coincided more than a decade
ago. In 1995, to encourage longer stays by package tourists, the
immigration department doubled the stay without a visa from 15 to 30
days. The result was a tourism boom just as the regional financial
crisis was savaging everything else in 1997.

Around that time Cambodia opened its borders with Thailand to
international travelers. A few bright sparks in Thailand soon realized
they could, in a day, trip to the border, hop into Cambodia and then
back to Thailand with a a new 30-day visa exemption stamp. The infamous
visa run was born. For some who could not pass muster with the existing
tight immigrant visa and employment permit regime -- like many English
teachers, NGO workers, and freelance consultants -- it was more
convenient than going to a Thai embassy to apply for a proper visa,
which could be refused.

When the baht plummeted in 1997, Thailand become even more attractive.
That same year public Internet started to appear. A few years later
mobile phone prices finally dropped and not long after, the cost of
international calls began to fall precipitously too. So in just a few
years Thailand became a much more practical place to live affordably or
set up shop for knowledge workers, consultants, and traders.
Unfortunately, scamsters also arrived, such as hustlers selling dud
stocks through "boiler room" operations to na๏ve people around the
world.

Just how many people live and work here using 30-day stamps is hard to
say, but with at least a dozen agencies now operating daily visa run
tours, plus those taking public or casino buses, 30,000-50,000 seems a
reasonable figure. Most of these are not dead beats. They likely spend
at least a $1,000 per month, many considerably more, on rent, meals,
laundry, taxis, drinks, shopping or golf. Pull up a seat in a beer bar
in Pattaya or Bangkok and pry a foreign resident's attention from his
drink and a bar girl and there's a good chance he's here
indefinitely on a tourist visa, probably working or whiling away his
retirement looking for love. And that costs money.

The trouble with this large and growing foreign community is that it is
undocumented. Tax collectors fret about tax evasion. Police are dealing
with more crime by foreigners, especially drug trafficking, sex work,
financial scams, and human trafficking. Cases have also come to light
of travel agents couriering passports to the border for immigration
stamps while the owners stay at home. Some agents simply cut even that
expense, using fake stamps to validate passports in their offices.

Foreign embassies, meanwhile, have complained about the criminal
element, warning about terrorism, particularly after bombing in Bali in
October 2002. Some doubtless felt a little schadenfraude when in August
2003 the CIA and Thai police, earning a $10 million bounty, nabbed
alleged Indonesian terrorist mastermind Hambali in Ayutthaya, where he
was apparently plotting to bomb the APEC leaders' meeting in Bangkok
the following October.

Hambali's arrest was a wake up call. Passport couriering was an
embarrassment, not to mention illegal. Immigration officers were under
pressure to sharpen their eyes, more so because of increasing violence
in Malay-Muslim majority southern Thailand. There was plenty of
material for painting conspiracies and drawing up threats.

In March 2004 Thailand signed up to the US terrorist interdiction
program, which spent about $2.6 million installing the Personal
Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System (Pisces) in the
immigration department. A request for $400,000 to expand Pisces further
in Thailand was made in the Fiscal Year 2007 Congressional budget
justification for foreign operations.

Pisces was developed to give advanced warning of suspects planning to
travel to America by matching a traveler's data against watch lists
compiled from various police and intelligence sources. About two dozen,
mostly developing, countries have signed up for Pisces, including
Cambodia. Critics accuse US intelligence agencies of using Pisces to
track suspects not planning to visit America and Pisces could also
allow immigration officers to discover the real identities of asylum
seekers, real or bogus, who destroy their passports and other
identifying documents in flight.

Cracking down on abuse of visa exemption stamps and tourist visas also
comes as bureaucrats are challenging the legality of foreigners using
nominees to get around company ownership limits. That was triggered
when Temasek, the Singaporean government investment fund, spent $1.7
billion to buy the Shin Corp telecommunications empire from the family
of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, provoking a popular
uproar over foreigners controlling a strategic national asset.

Usually foreigners can own no more than 49 percent of a company's
shares, the rest must be held by Thais, an inconvenience dealt with by
some legal hocus pocus. Indeed, such limits seem hard to justify when
Cambodia, China and Vietnam allow foreigners to fully own local
companies in most sectors. Legally, setting up a company is the only
option for self-employed foreigners here, such as footloose
consultants. It remains to be seen how the Temasek flap might effect
those at the lower end of corporate sleight of hand in Thailand. In
Singapore, by contrast, people with a track record and a simple,
coherent business plan can apply for the EntrePass work permit. Set-up
costs are low and sole trader company registration applications take
weeks not months.

Meanwhile, people like Jay, who at least works for a legitimate school,
stands a good chance of landing a work visa if their employers stands
by them. For everybody else, exit beckons, quite probably to easygoing
Cambodia, which issues one-year multiple-entry business visas at the
airport for $25.

That may be well and good for keeping out a few bad eggs like soccer
hooligans who have been known to vacation in Pattaya for months on end
to evade charges in Europe but Thailand's immigration and company
ownership practices are more suited to the analogue world of the 1970s
than the 21st century. They are time consuming, paperwork laden and
open to endless opportunities for petty graft. While they are not going
to sink foreign investment, neither are they an enticement.

And shifting immigration and visa regimes may cause Thailand to lose a
significant amount of spending by people who are not criminals and
would happily pay taxes if the visa regime clicked with the global
economy. That's bad news for Thais, but clearly good news for
Cambodians and Singaporeans.

--David Fulbrook, AsiaSentinel.com 2006-10-24

Ed Key wrote:Newest Visa news

Word on the street and has been proven. If a Farrang does 3X30 day tourist, he then can leave country and apply for a 90 day "O" non immigrant visa and then do 3X30 day tourist visa or another 90 day "O" non immigrant visa. If this stands true no one is hurt. Life goes on.

Always keep i mind the law depends on who you deal with at immigration and there current mood for that day of the week.

90 Day "O" Non Immigrant will be issued at Vientiene Lao

Eddie K