Your expat correspondent in Thailand is dead wrong.
As he is married to one of the Sino-Thai elite, he has a very restricted view into Thais in general, and into Southeast Asians, generally.

His comments about there being little violence in Thailand and in Southeast Asia in general are a joke. All Southeast Asian societies have a constant susurrus of violence beneath their public facade, and Thailand is no different. [LA replies: susurrus is a word I didn’t know. Its two definitions are: the indistinct sound of people whispering, and a light noise, like the noise of silk clothing or leaves blowing in the wind.] If you want, I can give you a lot of links to stories of Thai-on-foreigner violence and Thai-on-Thai violence; also, do remember the Thai military action in 2010 which officially resulted in the deaths of 91 Thais armed with nothing more sophisticated than slingshots and a few flare pistols.

Even amongst the Sino-Thai elite, there are contract murders and beatings resulting from business disputes, perceived loss of “face,” etc. And the children of the Sino-Thai elite literally get away with murder—five years later, the son of one of the Sino-Thai elite has still not been prosecuted for murdering a police officer in front of multiple witnesses, a Sino-Thai girl who killed five people in a van with her reckless driving still has not been prosecuted six months later, etc., ad nauseam.

The Sino-Thai elite all have a conspiracy-minded view of the world—as do all Asians, irrespective of income and educational level—and they all have superstitious beliefs regarding “black magic” and so forth. [LA replies: Whoops, another word soon to be banned.] They are the kind of people who would consume the pills made from the flesh of dead babies which were highlighted in a story I sent you a few days ago. And note that the elites of all Asian countries, with the exception of Japan and the Republic of Korea, are ethnic Chinese; it is they who run the governments and own the businesses.

Asian politics are focused around the use of power to obtain money, and the use of money to obtain power. Yes, his Sino-Thai wife and the junior generation are focused on shopping—whilst the older males who run their families/tribes/clans are all constantly jockeying for position in the civil and business realms in what they all view as a zero-sum game.

The USA absolutely does not need any more Asians of any stripe. Their worldview is a Hobbesian war of all against all, shaped by Confucian hyper-nepotism. They are uninterested in any sort of equitable civil polity—indeed, they are hostile to it, as they each wish their family/tribe/clan/region/racial sub-group/national/racial macro-group to dominate, in descending order of priority.