Reader question: What must my future Thai wife do before she can come to Belgium?

Hm, personally I received very friendly help at the municipality where I live. I have had several telephone and personal contacts with 2 contact persons at the municipality about my file, in the period February 2013 - present. I really had no complaints about that. The same goes for integration services. Cheers 🙂

However, what I am not happy with at all, and where I can agree with Gustaaf, is the attitude of the Belgian embassy in Bangkok. We were treated very unfriendly there. We once had a situation where we didn't hear the mobile phone when they called us for our affidavit to get married, and we were spoken to very bluntly. Furthermore, there was the explicit LIE of “it only takes a month for a family reunification visa, sir”. DVZ came to tell me something else afterwards: 6 months maximum. Ultimately, my wife's visa was approved after 5 months, but you should really distrust the Belgian embassy in Bangkok. Complaining to foreign affairs, which includes embassies, does not help because they do nothing. I still have the emails regarding this in my possession.

Perhaps there are politicians who will read this and want to take action. Ultimately, the salaries of embassy employees are paid from the sky-high taxes that we cough up here. But if we as hardworking citizens decide to leave this country behind us and emigrate, and therefore no longer pay taxes here, who will have a problem sooner or later? Sorry, I still get angry when I think about the rude attitude of the Belgian embassy.

Gentlemen politicians, please take action. Clean up that crap at the embassies.

There are indeed offices in Pataya that have an advantage at the Belgian embassy. I'll stick to the fact that it's the beautiful eyes of their representative that have to do it. Those agencies come in with a package of files and are out again in no time with a smile behind their ears. My partner was added as a friend on Facebook by such an agency and contacts were made. My darling thought she happened to find a good friend who could help us after the first refusal of her visa application. The new girlfriend asked for my details and I received an email. So it turned out to be an office. They guaranteed a visa if we did business with them. I didn't trust the business and asked them to send me a sample contract, which they did. Indeed, they guarantee a visa if the refusal is not caused by the applicant for whatever reason… In principle, they limit themselves to collecting the documents, the list of which can be found on the website of the embassy and thus ensure that your file is complete. If you don't get a visa, it must be your answers during the interview or something. When I let them know that I would try it again myself because their guarantee was not really a guarantee, I received a swear email and they assured me that I would never be able to appeal to them and that without them I would never get a visa. Six weeks later the visa was a fact. But thanks to a tip from an international law lawyer.

It is good to finally read a positive note. Unfortunately, not everyone who wants to get married is unable to live in Thailand for a year because they are still working or something. Wonder if there is a solution for this, because I'm in that boat. We want to get married under Belgian law and must therefore apply for a visa with a view to marriage. But I was already told that if you marry in Belgium and your wife travels back to Thailand, it will be very difficult for her to enter Belgium again. In any case, it would no longer work with a tourist visa because she is married and then people are afraid that she no longer wants to leave Belgium. Doesn't seem logical to me, but there are so many illogical things in this matter. For example, they do not think it is logical that you marry someone who then goes back to her country, while it is normal that a Belgian marine goes back on board perfectly after his marriage for several months and when he returns with harmony and drum band is festively welcomed back by his wife who sat alone for so long.

In our case, they had no reason to doubt and certainly no reason to lie, especially when I spontaneously forwarded a thorough evidence file to the Immigration Department. Less than 2 weeks later, the file was approved.

Perhaps there has been a change of personnel at the Belgian embassy in Bangkok in the meantime 🙂 ? I have heard that staff at some embassies "circulate" regularly.

Or have they perhaps received instructions to make life difficult for family reunifiers with all kinds of investigations that are useless to the honest citizen, but cost a lot of money?

Or maybe they are just overworked at the embassy there?

The fact is that 5 years ago, in 2010, there was already legislation against marriages of convenience, but today they have become much stricter. Stricter legislation came into effect around October 2012. My wife did not understand it at first when I explained to her what they meant by a marriage of convenience. When I told her “this is our file to prepare for investigation in fake marriage” I had to explain to her what I meant and she couldn't understand it, even though she is very intelligent. “You don't marry for fake, what's that supposed to mean?” was one of her responses. By the way, we met through a serious marriage agency in Bangkok and when I told them there, they didn't know where to find it.

I am really satisfied Gerard, for you and your wife, that things went well, but I cannot say that I read much positive about the Belgian embassy in Bangkok otherwise... It is honestly the first time that this has happened here and I still follow the articles on Thailandblog for about 2 years now 🙂 This is the “Place to be” of course if you want to get to know Thailand before you go there!

By the way, kudos to the editors: every day you learn something new here 🙂