Richard Barrow is dusting off his luggage in case he can’t renew visa

Yesterday, Richard Barrow, a popular British blogger and school employee in Samut Prakan, who has been living and working in Thailand for decades, says he had a surprise visit from the immigration bureau in regards to the renewal of his visa. Kapook reported the incident on their page saying that many Thai people admire the work he does for Thailand as a tourism and expat influencer.

Richard bemoaned on his Facebook page that “things didn’t look good” for an extension of his visa to stay in Thailand. He has worked for a school, who issue his work permit, for any years.

“Bangkok Immigration came to inspect my workplace. They were here for 3 hours. Looks like they will not extend my “visa”. They said I will probably have to leave the country. They will give me a final verdict next week.”

Social media has been full of speculation about Richard’s possible departure and assuming that it has something to do with his occasional swipes at Thai officialdom on his blogs. But Richard says none of that is true.

“I know a lot of people are speculating about the reasons with some crazy conspiracy theories. The Immigration officials gave me no indication that they were targeting me. I only passed last year because some influential people in government called the chief of Immigration.”

“In normal years, I would leave the country and come back with a tourist visa and start again. With the borders closed, my only option is to fly back to the UK. As I won’t have a Non-B visa, I cannot come back for months. Unfortunately, the family home in the UK is being sold.”

In the past few years Richard has had an annual wait to see if his application to stay would be approved. In the end he’s been able to pull in a few favours and make contact with leading officials to “sort things out”.

Richard has contacts at many levels of Thai society and is generally recognised as a ardent enthusiast about Thai life and is loyally followed by over 100,000 people on his Facebook page.

Apart from the fact Richard only promotes Bangkok Post articles, The Thaiger genuinely hopes that Richard is again able to sort out the paperwork and continue his many journeys and blogging around the Kingdom.

The Kapook article noted that Richard has been in Thailand for a long time without any problems. Some Thai social media speculation said the problems arose after he translated news of the student protests onto Twitter. But the general tone was that everyone is encouraging Richard and hoping he gets to stay in Thailand to continue doing what he loves, and does very well.

SOURCE: Kapook