I compliment your document, while noting that it misses or understates several key factors that are critical for me.
Renewing is an opaque and fraught process, every time, with delays and uncertainties and frustrations. We wonder if our cards were lost by CTT, or are sitting in a retired AIMA employee’s desk drawer, or simply discarded in the trash. It’s impossible to reach anyone or solve anything.
As renewal approaches, banks threaten to close our accounts because they know we’re heading into renewal limbo, and compliance isn’t interested in excuses that it’s AIMA’s fault.
Temporary residents spend months to years in oppressive travel limbo while waiting blindly and agonizingly for renewal after our cards expire.
Temporary residency lacks a feel of permanence and belonging. The government threatens to pass disruptive legislation every couple years. Might they revoke or non-renew our residence permits, and violently expel or kill us? [nervous glance toward the USA]
Residency does not enable me to renounce my current citizenship, which is an essential goal in my life plan, for both moral and practical reasons.
Residency does not provide a high-quality travel document allowing visa-free access to a great many travel destinations.
The last two points are key. All of the others are manageable nuisances, but acquiring Portuguese citizenship–ASAP!–so that I can renounce my old citizenship, then travel the world, is of utmost importance to me.
I’m sure it’s more complicated than this brief article suggests, but sound familiar?
Spain will regularize half a million immigrants.
Spain will proceed with an extraordinary process to regularize the legal status of foreigners living and working in the country, which is expected to cover half a million people, the government announced on Tuesday.
The start of the process was approved by the Council of Ministers and is intended for foreigners who had been living in Spain for at least five months by December 31, 2025, or who had requested international protection from the Spanish authorities by the same date and who, in both cases, have no criminal record, explained the Minister responsible for migration, Elma Saiz
We are a group of UX/UI Design students and, like many of you, we’ve been following the ongoing challenges with the AIMA platform in Portugal.
We are conducting a study to understand the main pain points, technical bugs, and navigation issues that immigrants face when trying to use their services (in person or digital) . Our goal is to propose a more human-centered and functional solution as part of our project.
If you have 5 minutes to spare, please help us by filling out this anonymous survey:
As an ancient ‘UX’ professional myself… the rubbish old SEF portal is the least of our problems. At least it kind of works, unlike the rest of AIMA:
totally broken processes
massive political meddling in the rate of processing
shifting priorities - chasing political gains like dropping everything to find irregular immigrants, so they can produce news stories about expelling them
systems that don’t interoperate with each other
‘new’ procedure and system launches that work for 2 weeks and then fall apart
AIMA announced this yesterday. Following is all I know about it. Unclear if it applies to ARI (the AIMA screenshots do show examples for “Renovação de Autorização de Residência” as well as “Manifestação de Interesse” and CPLP), or if lawyers/etc. can attend in your place.
I do hope this doesn’t result in emails like “Hey you, living thousands of miles away. Please attend this appointment we scheduled at our convenience that may be totally unworkable for you. Oh, and you probably can’t reschedule because we don’t know how to do that.”
Original post on Facebook:
Following the analysis of grant applications or renewal of residence permit, a new in-person documentary verification may be required. If you received a call, by e-mail, with the subject “Scheduling new service for documentary verification” and according to the model presented in the images, you must attend in person at the place, day and time indicated in it.
On the day of the new service, you must take your passport and the notification received, which you must show at the entrance of the service station.
This verification is mandatory in person, scanned documents are not accepted. Failure to show up can lead to the refusal of the residence permit application.
