Visa–everywhere you want to be
I am so pleased to welcome April. February and March generally have a lot wrong with them, but life here has added another dimension of vexedness to these months. This is when my visa comes up for renewal. The first year I was here I made the mistake of showing my MoD identification badge to the border guards before I had a work visa. This resulted in them detaining me for a while before threatening to deport me. Yes! Deport! This was while I was freshly arrived, so it caused me to have a wary relationship with the border for quite a long time. And a fetishistic relationship with my visa.
Getting the work visa is not difficult, but it’s not entirely easy either. Like any dealings with bureaucracy it is laced with situations which would try the patience of an oyster, as well as the occasional catch-22 or impossible-to-fulfill requirement. I began dealing with this while still in Argentina. The Slovene embassy in Buenos Aires sent me a visa application form and on the list of the necessary accompanying documents was a copy of your Slovene lease with the Nova Gorica city hall’s stamp. I thought I might have to wait til I got here to get hold of that one.
In the intervening years there have been fewer difficulties and no more threats of deportation, but it’s still been an annual headache, a process that takes six weeks of gathering, copying, signing, translating, submitting, addending, resubmitting, etc ad nauseam. No two years has the process been the same, and each year there is some additional surprise. It has really caused me to dread the end of winter.
In addition to never being the same process two years in a row, applying for the visa is never the same for any two people. Some new employees were denied work visas because of Slovenia’s new EU membership. This year’s process began as charmingly as ever, with a letter informing us that Adam needs a visa to be here too, even though he was born here and even though, as a Polish citizen, he is EU and therefore shouldn’t need any documentation (you would think). When I went in to apply for his visa I had to show Magda’s passport with his page in it, and I heard with great relief that Magda, as an EU citizen, didn’t need a visa (yet Adam did…?)
Then I went back to renew mine and they told me that Magda does need a visa to be here for more than three months. It’s only been ten.
So Friday we gathered every document in the world and all went as one big happy family to the center of local bureacracy, Nova Gorica’s občina, or city hall. Adam was sleeping in his voziček, but we knew that feeding, wailing, or pooping (or more probably a combination of all three) was not far off so it was with some despair that we saw a massive wait ahead of us.
After about 90 minutes of nothing happening we were well and truly vexed with the bureaucracy, and when the original bureaucrat approached us we were not in a happy mood. She had that apologetic look on her face that decent people have when they have to give strangers bad news.
Here’s the news: Magda needs a visa. If she wishes, it can be valid for five years. If I wish, mine can also be valid for five years. As can Adam’s. If we wish.
its one of life’s great-myths that if you are an EU citizen you don’t need a Visa to live in other EU countries. The netherlands are full of people who are being caught out by this. The EU countries agreed on the principle of visa-free residence and work but retained the right to impose visa requirements. I’ve never heard yet of a country that isn’t imposing that right. heaps of people, especially from England, think they can live and work in Holland wthout a visa but the fact remains you need to apply for a residential visa and your employer needs to apply for a visa on the grounds that there is no Dutch person available to do the work you do. The fact that it is pretty much rubber-stamped is something else all together, the bureacracy involved can still take 6 months or more. And if you’re from outside the EU like me………………
Luckily our son Jacob has a Dutch dad, who also registered his interest in him at birth, so he doesn’t need a Visa!
Comment by faith — Tuesday 5 April 05 @ 22.10 MDT+2.00