Did you look into family reunification? I think you can go with your GV or D7 and then apply for family reunification (meaning your family can join you without going through the entire GV/D7 requirements).
We decided to apply for the kids as well since the law is not very clear and the kids have to show connection to Portugal to get the residency.
I have a question on the timing when the spouse is eligible to apply for citizenship after main applicantâs naturalisation, assuming:
- they have been married for more than 3 years at the point of main applicantâs naturalisation;
- the spouse is not included in GV application.
The citizenship law requires the foreign spouse married to a Portuguese national for at least 3 years, to be eligible to apply for citizenship under âacquisition of nationality by act of willâ.
Therefore the different way to ask my question is whether the marriage duration before main applicantâs naturalisation counted towards this 3-year requirement.
I was told this time does count. Also, if you have been married at least 6 years, the âconnection to the National Communityâ is assumed. See Article 9 part 3 of the Nationality Law.
For parents above 65 to be considered dependent, what documentation needs to be readied?
Seems like you are suggesting that future-minor-children have no need to be on the application
Out of curiosity, on-shore residency seems to have much easier programs than off-shore. Would anyone need to do a GV for on-shore?
I canât imagine. D7 requirements are fairly straightforward if you have any money at all.
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Thanks - you are confirming something that should be helpful to a lot of folks out there
For children I would agree that the situation is much more complex than with adult main applicants or spouses. This is primarily because there is no maximum age limit for adults, so the dependent children naturally add another layer of complexity. To @RidleyQLero point, I do think for children some type of comprehensive FAQ would be helpful because you have to re-evaluate the status of the children each renewal to see if they qualify. At least for me, in 4 years I am not necessarily going to remember all of this discussion and the fine points and distinctions. I might try to piece some of this together next year when I have time and we can post a collaborative document online.
For example, one question I am not sure I have seen answered anywhere is to what extent continuous qualification of the children is needed prior to citizenship. Letâs say the children are 15 yo at time of application and 21 yo when the main applicant gets citizenship. Of course, the investment fund would be dissolved since it has been 6 years. The child would have 5 years of continuous "residencyâ based on the GV. Could they use that to apply for citizenship say when they are 27 even thought they have not been residents (GV or otherwise) from age 21 to 27 ( a gap of 6 years)? I have been led to believe that the answer is no, that you must maintain all GV requirements for the entire time prior to citizenship. This seems a bit harsh to me. There are a lot of nuances like this that I think would be worthy of clarification based on actual law rather than opinion.
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@282cf5067c427e3f7493 Therein lies the problem. I was advised that this is possible, but you also have to maintain your GV qualifications for the entire time of your perm residence. That is not such a desirable situation if its true.
Let me clarify that it may not be that you have to maintain the actual GV investment, but I think maybe the point I was advised is that perm residence under GV is not the same thing as perm residence in general. The fees for perm residence for a GV holder is much more expensive, something like 5000+ euros each renewal. If you are including multiple family members it can get very expensive. Admittedly, my knowledge on this is not great and my memory of the details is imperfect. But its another reason to have a comprehensive document that outlines all of these details.
For what itâs worth, I donât think it requires maintenance of the investment, once you receive the permanent residency.
But yes, itâd sure be nice if there were a comprehensive everything. That said, I imagine no one wants the liability associated with making one that covers all the fringe cases.
I would say that the getgoldenvisa folks have a fairly nice FAQ, assuming you trust them, though of course it doesnât cover everything, certainly the stuff above about how/whether you need the GV for spouse/kids since of course itâs not necessarily in their interest:
They explicitly state you donât have to maintain the investment.
I vaguely remember that we talked about all this before â citizenship for children and permanent residency with ARI. Here is this awesome post by @susanayang talking about different types of permanent residency and citizenship in length.
It seems that we do have to maintain our investment. Scroll down to â Option 2 â To Apply for Portuguese Permanent Residence by Investment (Portugal Golden Visa Program)â
In that thread, there was also discussion about citizenship for children after her post.
Exactly. A lot of conflicting information.
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Scrolling down further from Option 2 to Option 3 in @susanayangâs long read (linked above) gives more information. She points out that there are 2 types of applications for Permanent residence, depending on whether the applicant remains offshore or not.
In what @susanayang refers to as Option 2 via investment there is an application for permanent residence through investment which exempts the applicant from being physically in Portugal (except for 35 days over the next 5 years) but at a price of ~âŹ7455 per applicant. In the SEF website, the second bullet under âNotesâ at the bottom of https://imigrante.sef.pt/en/solicitar/residir/art80/ refers to this. The majority of applications for Permanent Residence in Portugal are from persons who fulfil the 5-year temporary residency requirement by virtue of being physically resident in the country before their application. These via physical residency applications commit the applicant to being physically resident in Portugal during the permanent residency period (or most of it). @susanayang calls this Option 3 and such applications cost ~âŹ300 per applicant. If I understand it correctly, all Permanent Residency applications require proof of completion of 5-year temporary residency plus language competence plus clean tax and police records.
Thereâs a lot of misinformation on this topic and I canât help but think itâs due to attorneys who have financial incentive to steer clients include their children on their GV application. I recommend people ask attorneys who specialize in citizenship, not GV. Thatâs what I did and she confirmed itâs very simple for minor children.
Article 2 of the nationality law:
Acquisition by minors or disabled children
Minors or disabled children one of whose parents acquires Portuguese nationality may
also acquire it by means of a declaration.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.legislationline.org/documents/id/20134&ved=2ahUKEwidp-WH0fH0AhUHHs0KHfDDBfMQFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1PnyaVektKyR7q8x-BUIBs
I also recommend reading this very comprehensive report on Portuguese nationality which also confirms the same thing.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/66204/RSCAS_GLOBALCIT_CR_2020_1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwidp-WH0fH0AhUHHs0KHfDDBfMQFnoECCMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1zSbmaAYezTGmgI9JBKPlH
I know what youâre saying, but itâs not just that the âmisinformationâ comes from attorneys. âact of willâ doesnât mean âthere arenât any conditionsâ much like free speech comes with the donât-yell-fire clause.
so this is another part of the gov saying that there needs to be ties if you go this route.
Now probably in practice the tie is simpler than stated. Portugal is a very family-friendly country. I think susana has stated that itâs really simple to meet the study requirement, take a language course part time and that counts. The SEF agents might look at a situation and say âthese people moved here and have a house and are integrated, we donât care, accept the kids.â Again, as my lawyer has stated and susana has stated, none of it is cut and dried, but none of it is all that hard either most of the time, not from what I have seen/heard. The thing is of course that many people here want cut-and-dried in a country where little ever is so AFAICT.
I agree GV lawyers have a financial incentive to include the kids and some will misinform or simply avoid passing additional information, much as the Renewal By Andersen people failed to inform me that I could have gone down to the hardware store and ordered a replacement sash for my window for $600 instead of paying them $3500 for an inferior product. This is just how stuff works. Though there is, as stated, some cause to want the GV too - If the kids donât have GV then they also donât have residency in the intervening period. You also risk the laws changing in the extant 5-6 years - unlikely, but some would prefer to pay to avoid the risk. Plus of course if you wait to naturalize the kids until you get naturalized, then thatâs another 1-2 years of waiting between your application and their application, then the following however long it takes for your kidsâ applications to process. So itâs just a q of how much the money is worth to you versus the benefit.
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Plus, know that Loheiman is assuming that the kids are under 18 and will remain 18 under after 5 years. Susana and others have been very clear that the route for citizenship is very different if the children are over 18. Its not as simple as saying that lawyers are incentivized to steer children to GV. In some cases, that is the best option and if your children will be over 18 it may be the only option.
I had the same question of whether to apply for the kids â but at the end went along per the âdonât be penny wise, pound foolishâ quote. Itâs not worth it to save $10-15K USD (I know itâs a lot of money) on a 350K-500K investments. For most people, getting the citizenship eventually for the kids is perhaps more important than for themselves (the parents). So why risk itâŠ
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Interestingly, Portuguese embassy at San Francisco indicated that children born outside of Portugal to Portuguese parents must be born after parents nationalization to be able to acquire Portuguese citizenship. (Although, it is not clear if it only applies to only the two types of naturalization in the parentheses)
If the Portuguese parents were granted citizenship through naturalization (e.g. through grandparents, Sephardi Jewish ancestry), only children of the applicant born after the date of approval have the right to become citizens through the process described above. This means adult children born before the date of approval do not have a right to be citizens and minors may request it as children of Portuguese parents born abroad but present documents proving their connection to the Portuguese Community.
Based on all the helpful responses above, and considering the topical question, would it be final to say that for the purposes of the GV:
-
Children who will continue to be minors after 5 years should be left off the GV as other forms of citizenship can be applied?
-
Children who will be majority age after 5 years should be added onto the GV as few alternative forms of citizenship paths exist, particularly simultaneously with their other family members?
-
The Spouse can be left off the GV as long as s/he can wait a minimum of 3 years or up to 5 years? (Have we really answered the timeline question of whether itâs 3 (or 5) years of marriage overall or duration of marriage to a Portuguese citizen)?
Also, does scrolling down on this link suggest that Portuguese community links examples are as simple as:
- Visits to Portugal (photos)
- Receipts from hotels, restaurants, medical bills, airlines
- Portuguese clubs or Associations in US
Thanks! 
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I asked my lawyer about leaving the spouse off and they said 3 years after my citizenship - doesnât matter how long weâve been married. I forget the exact details but it was a definite âno wayâ from my POV anyway.
5 years seems like far too close a tolerance given all the normal delays.
And of course all this presumes you donât care about any sort of residence or other access to the country in the intervening time, AND that only-minimum-effort doesnât result in your own citizenship app getting screwed up (no givens here really).
Iâm with @tedbean on this. Is it really worth saving a few bucks? Especially now that the lottery has been done away with so it may be that you wonât have a problem getting an appointment for everyone at the same time thereby reducing that concern? (It seems unclear whether anyoneâs going to be able to squeeze in on cancellations in the new regime.)
(Of course, at this point, is it even worth applying, given youâre going to be waiting a long time for an appointment, and potentially even longer for visa issuance, esp given this seeming end-of-year surge of applications⊠I wonder if over-popularity is going to now work against the program. Not that it really bothers me.
I think this IS going to suck for stuff like the Mercan investments, where Mercan has a real distinct desire to get you out of the property/investment at the 5 year mark because thereâs penalty clauses built in.
And on top of that, place is going to hell in a handbasket anyway:
)
And yes, the examples are that simple AFAIK. However I suspect itâs going to be some N number of those simple things and having those add up into the perception that you care about the place. And just doing the minimum boots-on-ground isnât what Iâd call building additional ties.