What we can tell you about the process is that, in the end, it all worked well. We’re not sure if that’s because we ended up processing our renewal through the old agency’s system or what. But our experience has been echoed by a lot of people. So this is how it is, until it changes. (Which is very bureaucracy, right?)

Our timeline looks like this:

~ On March 3rd the SEF site started giving us a different error message, (We forget what, but it was something along the lines of “try again later.”) At this point, we began to hope! (Quietly, with lots of whistling in the wind.)
~ We successfully went through the sef.pt website and requested “automatic renewal’ on March 8th (Fri). An error message was initially returned on a later page, preventing us from completing the renewal request. We closed the browser and tried again and the website gave us a notice that payment was required and that we would receive a message about how to pay at the email associated with our account.
~ Payment notice was in our inbox within minutes and included MB information to pay.
~ The payment notice asked us to wait 48 hours to submit payment so that our renewal request could be properly processed.
~ On March 11th (Mon) we went to a MB machine and paid. We kept the receipts. Note that this is not a requirement — SEF accepts MB payments electronically. We just wanted the hard copy receipt in case.
~ On March 13th (Wed) the money left our bank account.
~ On March 16th (Sat) our online file showed a new message “concluído” (concluded). No further communication was received. We consigned ourselves to the special times know as “waiting.”
On April 5th, our new cards were delivered by CTT. One of us had to sign for both cards. ID was not requested. (Our delivery person seemed to enjoy our obvious enthusiasm at seeing the envelopes.)

A few more bits:
~ We started requesting renewal at both the AIMA site and the SEF sites on February 25th (1 month prior to expiration).

• The AIMA site never gave us an opportunity for an appointment — this is something many people we know have mentioned. (Although, one couple we know got appointments for the following week just one distract away! Evidence of the randomness of this system from a certain perspective.)
• The SEF site consistently gave us a the message that our type of residency permit was not eligible for automatic renewal. There is some evidence that this error may be tied to the website’s built-in English translation. We recommend using your browser’s translation program instead.
  

~ The cards use all of the same info from our initial permit (name, address, birthplace, picture) but have a new number. If you have to change an address or otherwise update any information, your process may be different.
~ We figure we’ll need to update our SEF accounts at some point. Either to open one at AIMA or to update our files with the new Permit number.
~ Our processing date was March 16th, and our cards are valid until that date in 2027 (exactly three years).

Lessons Learned?

• Make sure the email address associated with your AIMA and SEF accounts is correct.
• Start trying to do the automatic renewal about a month before your permit expires.
• Try to renew at both the AIMA and SEF websites. (Eventually AIMA will be the primary, accurate source.)
• Take a stab at it a couple of times a day.
• If you are able to start the process and get an error message, close everything down and try again in an hour or so.
• If it succeeds (at the SEF site), you will almost immediately get an email message. Check your spam box if you don’t. If it still hasn’t shown up in an hour or so, check the SEF site again for information.
• “Concluído” (concluded) is the gold! Once you see that, your new card will arrive.

That’s it. Have faith, there is progress.

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!

For starters, we didn’t have ONE appointment this past Monday, we had two. Two appointments, but only half an hour apart. . . 30 minutes and 225 kilometers apart. How this happened will always be a mystery (although Lisa took an entertaining stab at trying to guess a few weeks ago) but that was the hand we were dealt. “Didn’t you try and get them changed?” you might very well ask, but here’s the thing: there was recently an election in Portugal, and one of the hot-button issues in the country was <drumroll> the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras! We can’t begin to explain why it was a problem, not the details anyway, but there was (and is, actually) a movement afoot to disband SEF and distribute it’s responsibilities throughout other agencies. Because things surrounding the agency were so fraught this past winter we were advised by many folks to just leave the appointments alone. Try to reschedule, they said, and there was a non-zero chance that our appointments would be pushed out several months. The odds might be low, but the stakes were enormous. We decided to make these appointments work.

The plan in a nutshell: Lisa took a train on Sunday afternoon to Lisbon. She got a hotel in the city, and from there she killed time until her 3:30PM appointment on Tuesday. MEANWHILE, John picked up a rental car on Tuesday morning, drove to the … er… town of Portalegre. (It’s a quaint little town, really, but for a 3-hour drive a fella might want something more) for his 3:00PM appointment. Fun fact: John had the times mixed up, and if not for an off-handed conversation with his dearest bride while killing time in a grocery store he would have com-PLETE-ly missed it. Yikes.

The very common advice given to folks in our situation is not to sweat your SEF appointment. If you were going to get turned down it would happen at the D7 stage, back in the United States; your documents are pretty thoroughly reviewed at that time. And here’s the kicker – the whole point of that review is to make sure everything is in order for your eventual SEF appointment. The D7 Visa, in and of itself, doesn’t really have many requirements to satisfy, they only put you through the ringer at that stage to weed out folks who would fail at the SEF level. While it feels like the D7 can be very demanding, it’s actually just the sieve that you’re being squeezed through in anticipation of the residency requirements. And so it follows, if you got your D7 (or other visa), your SEF appointment it’s probably going to be a piece of cake.

So, not to drag this out tooooo much, a tale of two appointments. John gets to the office in Portalegre about a half hour early. There are signs on the door advising visitors to wait outside until they are called, but a security guard sees him and waves him in. He is seen immediately. A nice lady with very little English (usual caveat applies: this is not a bad thing, we’re just being descriptive) communicates that she will simply take all the documents John brought, which include a bunch of extra stuff we weren’t sure we’d need. No problem, she seems to say. A few minutes later he is called over to have his picture taken and his index fingerprints scanned. A few minutes after that he is called up to pay and given a temporary copy of his residency document, and told that the actual card will arrive in the mail in two to four weeks. All told, he’s done in about 20 minutes and has basically zero interaction during the whole process. Lisa’s experience is slightly more complex – she is actually asked to present three documents (out of the 15 or so that we had prepared for each of us). Neither of us was asked about proof of residence / a current lease, which if you read our last post you know was a source of consternation for us. Oh well. Unsurprisingly the Lisbon office is busier than the one in East Bumble@#*(&@ and she takes maybe 30 minutes to get the same process finished.

In other words, the people giving advice are right, and it was a piece of cake for both of us. If you are reading this because you’re hoping to glean some guidance for your own SEF appointment, all we can say is this: over-prepared beats under-prepared, because there are stories of people being asked for more than we were, or that their documents were scrutinized with great diligence. Take nothing for granted. BUT, if you are genuinely sure that you’ve got everything they tell you to bring, you can probably get as good night’s sleep knowing that it’s going to work out for you. For us, the end result is that we have both been approved for our residency visas and can now reside in Portugal for up to two years if we would like. The future is now as wide open as it has ever been for us… which, naturally, presents its own challenges. But that’s a story for another time.

Every day they open a pouch of preprocessed manila envelopes that arrives, each filled with the paperwork requesting visas submitted by (for the purposes of my dream, at least) hopeful Americans. João now has the chore of opening those pouches and sorting the envelopes. In practice the paperwork is simply piled in an available cube, although care is usually taken to keep the ones marked as being family units or married together, and to put the newer paperwork at the back of the cube. The paperwork is picked up by workers as they have time and availability. Some take only one (or, one family unit) at a time; others take several because they don’t like to leave their desk to walk to the cube.

Since the paperwork has already been vetted by VFS, (we’ve shared thoughts on this part of the process already), most of the requests are in good order, making their task one of verification and double-checking. SEF workers are proud of their country and fiercely protective about who they allow to reside here. Discovering an error is a cause for much discussion and story-telling of previously made errors and their discovery. Horror stories are rare, but loom large in everyone’s memory. Translations of the personal statements often produce unintentionally hilarious assertions. Some dreams shared in those statements are met with cynical head-shaking. All are read with care and attention; every detail verified to the best of the caseworkers’ ability.

Most requests are approved within the 60 to 90 day window (un)officially set by SEF administrators, although holiday times, strikes, politics, the weather, and personal issues contract and expand that window greatly. Requests from individuals for updated time frames are sent one of three politely worded templates, chosen at random and translated into the inquiring language by a program written a few years ago by the child of a former supervisor. (The employee in question has since retired and no one has checked the translation since it was installed. Some errors in syntax and word choice remain unverified; frequently provoking a sense of unreality in receivers.)

When approved, the paperwork is placed in a secure location where a colleague collects it, makes sure all check listed items are verified, and then hands it off, back to our friend João, for finalization. This is the tedious part of the process, involving the printing and gluing of the actual visa into a page of the passport (presuming it was included) after the scheduling of the all-important residency appointment. This appointment gives SEF a last chance to verify the fitness of the person applying for residency. Choosing an appointment time and place has been made exceptionally easy. João opens a scheduling window and is told the next available time and location approximately 90 days after the scheduled date of arrival. The chosen time/ place is added to the visa , which is then printed and added to the passport. Sometimes a new intern prints the visa before making the appointment, which provokes great consternation and shaking of heads. The appointment is still scheduled, as SEF workers know that the information as to how to find one’s appointment is easily available on their website.

Finally João places the completed paperwork into its own mailer, affixes its designated FedEx mailing label (printed by VFS and included in the original packet), and sets it aside for mailing. Granted, I know absolutely none of this to be true, but it the best theory my dreams have come up with that fit the facts as we know them. John and I are about a month out from our SEF appointments and so I’m understandably concerned with it.