Ah I remember that first scramble to get all our docs together and investment made - full of excitement and promise. Going on 3 years of SEF/AIMA mostly ignoring us since then, so when you say “months” I hope you’re prepared for “years.”
Also just to clarify on the “citizenship five years from application”… let’s see how tomorrow’s elections go, but:
- The current government apparently never liked the “Wait time counts towards 5 year residency” thing, and if they win again will probably never put that into formal regulation.
- So what we have instead is the “Portuguese Lotto” that all us GV’ers have (perhaps unknowingly) entered into, with random policy interpretations by the AIMA front line.
- Yet to be seen if it was just electoral posturing for the anti-immigrant crowd, but the AD’s (PSD+CDS) campaign comments and electoral programme propose increasing PT’s years to citizenship from 5 to 7 or even 10. We’ve already gone through two rounds of debating whether this could be retroactive for those of us who’ve already applied - have a good read of that comments thread.