New visa regulations in the Land of Smiles may put frowns on the faces of thousands of long term residents
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 fare 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 naïve 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.
