In Media Res

We spend a lot of our posts talking about our travels (we called it “the Ramble” for a reason don’tcha know…) but hopefully it isn’t a surprise to hear that we’re off the road far more than we’re on it. It’s just that we’re not all that interested in talking about grocery shopping and laundry and assume that y’all feel the same way. It isn’t all ho-hum living, though; we’re in a bit of a stressful buzz here at The Ramble at this very moment, as a long-brewing bureaucratic headache has burst into a full-blown red tape migraine at a particularly tricky time. Nobody is to blame, it’s just a circumstantial tsunami. Put on your waders and we’ll tell you a tale!

As has been exhaustively detailed, we’re in Portugal on our first, two-year Residency Permit; we were made official in late March of 2022, so we’ve got a renewal/anniversary coming up in a few months. Not inherently a big deal, it’s hardly a surprise after all. What was possibly a big deal was a shake up in the Portuguese immigration bureaucracy (what was known as Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras or “SEF”) which to be fair needed some shaking. The Portuguese weren’t happy with it and most immigrants at best considered it an irritant. There had been a general sense that change could be coming since before we moved here, but then in early June of ’23 the government announced that SEF would be less “re-organized” and more “shattered into its component pieces and divvied up across numerous agencies.”

Even as late as November of last year this presented no obvious hassle for us. It was clear that all we had to do at the beginning of March was to log into the website of the agency that processes Permits, upload documentation about our stay, and approximately two weeks later our new cards would arrive in the mail. This processing of foreign migrants would be assumed by an entirely new agency, the “Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo” or “AIMA” . Apparently this brand-new agency had been in the works for many months and actually kicked off in late October, but when SEF officially closed in late November, nothing had been done.

There was no new AIMA website. There were no protocols or processes in place. People who worked for SEF left the workplace not knowing if they had a job to go to the next day.

Utter chaos.

SEF reportedly handed over 350,000 active cases to AIMA and as of late December almost all of those cases had NOT been processed. We personally know people whose Permits expired in November who are still waiting to make an appointment to process the paperwork required to renew. According to a report by Jornal Público, the president of AIMA Portugal, Luís Gois Pinheiro, has set a goal of processing all the backlogged cases by mid-2025.

But wait, there’s more! Extra confusingly, the actual renewal of residence permits was taken over by the “Instituto de Registo e Notariado” or “IRN.” You can squint and see the logic – AIMA is processing people actively migrating into Portugal, while the renewal of these types of permits is more of a clerical/administrative issues so it goes to the existing bureau for such things. “Oh yay,” one might say except that IRN as of this writing refers permit renewals to the old, defunct, SEF website. Dear readers from the future: I do hope you’re having a good chuckle about “that crazy couple of weeks that old immigrant friends reminisce about”, instead of option B which is that we all look like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal.”

Let’s be clear: it is not a mystery exactly how this got bollixed up. The fate of SEF had been debated, voted on, and changed several times over many years. It was a political hot potato that no one wanted to run afoul of and could have been un-mandated right up until its last days. Moreover, the resignation of the Prime Minister had/(has) the government in some disarray. And it’s not like Portugal is uniquely challenged in this way – anybody remember the rollout of the website for the Affordable Care Act? Still, knowing how it happened and that it’s not an evil plot doesn’t change the chaos that’s swirling.

Anyways, the whole thing would just be something that we sit in our armchairs and watch with mild interest except that we don’t want to be caught in residency limbo at a bad time, e.g. while crossing an international border. We’ve already put the kibosh on a plan to see a Mark Rothko exhibition in Paris this spring with friends of ours, and we’re starting to sweat plans even further out, even into the summer. We also had to require some modifications to a family member’s medical situation so that we could ensure that we’d be able to provide care. Nothing life-threatening, but tricksy.

Our local social media group has a local lawyer in it who has offered to do the research to see what the best process for renewal is, and how to do so. We should know more on that in the next couple of weeks. What we know now is that we can’t do anything about our residency status until late February if all is going well. And if it isn’t going well, it’s literally unknowable how long it could be before there’s resolution.

So . . . Happy New Year! and: Stay Tuned!