Hello Phil, I've followed your website for over twelve years now, and even though I don't teach in Thailand anymore I still like to have a look every week or so. I teach in other countries, but my wife still lives in Thailand so I still spend a lot of time there.

One of the sections in your site that is interesting is the "great escape" section. For a lot of people, teaching in Thailand is something they'll do for a few years. After that they may well head back to their home country.

Now getting to the point, a lot of these teachers will get married to a Thai citizen during their time in the country. If they are from the UK, they will find it difficult to take their spouse back home with them. To get a settlement visa for their spouse the sponsor must find a job earning 18.6K per year or more. They can earn less than this if they have savings, but only if the savings are more than 16K. The visa is also very expensive and is often rejected, meaning that people pay out thousands of pounds for absolutely nothing.

I recently joined a Facebook group called "I LOVE MY 'FOREIGN' SPOUSE: defend the rights of cross-border couples" This group has over 10,000 members. Last week the admin of the group created a petition to parliament to ask to change these laws. Maybe it can't happen right now, but if people keep on bringing the issue to the government's attention something might change in our favour one day. I think that you must be aware of these rules as you are British too!

<a href="https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/188503" title="Here is the petition:">Here is the petition:</a>

If you could feature this on your site, then that would be amazing. It's quite a big issue that must affect hundreds, if not thousands, of your readers.

Kind Regards.

John