It is now early September and I have returned to Madrid after two months of travel to Málaga, Sevilla and Galicia. Currently, I am in the process of renewing my residence visa and getting an on-line “cita” or appointment is proving to be very difficult. Because the offices of immigration were closed for over three months in the spring, the backlog and also the huge demand from tens of thousands of immigrants to renew their residences has caused a major bottleneck in the system. Many, desperate to get an appointment, have resorted to paying “conseguidores”, who are essentially individuals who sit at their computers all day, hacking away at the system to get an appointment. The fees can range from 50 euros to 300 euros depending on what type of license one is attempting to get. The practice is not legal, per se, but apparently according to some immigration lawyers, the “conseguidores” have a good success rate. My efforts at getting an appointment the past seven days have been fruitless and the thought of paying someone to do it for me is tempting and starting to look beneficial. Until I renew my “tarjeta de residencia” it is inadvisable that I leave Spain because without it, I will not be allowed back in the country because of restrictions on Americans coming to Spain. But, when I do have the ID card, it will be my golden ticket to move between the U.S. and Spain freely.
Speaking of my residency, I think it may be interesting for the readers of this blog to understand how exactly I went through the process to get residency in Spain. When one seeks residency in a foreign country the most important thing to know is that the application has to be done in the citizen’s home country. You cannot come to Spain on a typical 90 day stay and apply here. For me, living so close to Washington, DC, I had the advantage of going directly to the Spanish Embassy to chat with the staff about my options and also to hear first-hand about the paperwork I would need to submit. Spanish Consulates on their web sites have slightly different requirements and I believe the Spanish Embassy has the most straightforward approach to assigning visas. Because my plan was to live in Spain and not work in Spain, I was told to apply for their non-lucrative visa. To get this visa, I had to submit a police background check which also had to have an Apostille of the Hague to verify its authenticity. Furthermore, I had to submit financial documents showing that I had the resources to live in Spain for a year without working but the threshold was not too high being right around $35,000 in cash accounts, savings accounts, retirement accounts, stocks and bonds etc…Another key component to getting the visa is that you have to pay for private health insurance in Spain. The government does not want me using their public health care system because with this non-lucrative visa, I am not paying taxes into the system. I decided to go with Sanitas which is the biggest private health care group in Spain. Getting all of these documents at first seems daunting but once I began the process I just decided to be patient and follow the instructions from the Embassy. Timing is of the utmost importance. Certain documents cannot be older than three months and you also need to have the exact date of your flight to Spain when submitting the documents to the Embassy. I started to sweat a little bit in late June when I still had not been issued my visa knowing that my flight was leaving in a month but I did hear back from the Embassy in late June and got my papers. This, as I learned, was still not the final process. Upon entering Spain, I had to get a permanent address in Madrid, had to pay a fee for an appointment for my fingerprints and then go to the National Police station in southern Madrid to submit the paperwork the Embassy gave back to me along with my address document and photos. Waiting in line with hundreds of immigrants from countries from all over the world made me have great empathy for anyone trying to become a citizen of another country. I was only here to get a visa that would allow me to have a year of travel and adventure in a country that I love while almost all of the other people around me were desperately trying to get work visas, were asylum seekers or trying to rejoin with family members. I wished that somehow the paperwork and bureaucracy didn’t have to play such a part in one’s desire to move to another country but after speaking with the policeman who took my fingerprints, it was enlightening to hear his side of the immigration story. Spain, just like every other nation, needs to have robust immigration but it needs to be legal not only to protect Spain but also to have fewer individuals living in the shadows of society. I thanked him for his time and perspective and he told me that my ID card would be ready in forty days from that day. I would not receive any notice to come pick it up. I just had a window of time to go back and get it. When day 41 hit, I was back again and sure enough, my card was ready and the process which began in the US in April finally came to a close in October in Madrid. With the visa, I am required to spend at least 183 days per year in Spain from the day that I first entered Spain on the visa. That was no problem since I only spent three weeks in the US from July 2019 to July 2020.
That ID card expired in July and I had to renew my visa again and submitted all of my documentation on line with the help of my lawyer in June. I received word from the government that my non-lucrative visa was approved and this new card will be good for two years. The big question now is, when will I finally get an appointment to go back to the National Police station and give my fingerprints for the card??? Covid-19 has only served to exacerbate the sluggish bureaucratic process and with cases on the rise again in Spain, I fear, metaphorically, that it may be a while before the congestion in the System clears up. But, if I have gleaned anything after living many years in Spain, I have learned that patience is not only a virtue but a prerequisite.