THAILAND - The End of the Thailand Visa Run

Asiasentinel.com, 24 October 2006

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.

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