You probably need to read the relevant threads here and have a good heart to heart with your lawyer about the experiences the rest of us are having. That said, there are mostly no appointments and there havenāt been enough for a long time and some lawyers are simply going to be better at being more aggressive at squeezing appointments out of the portal than others, and if you donāt have one of those lawyers and/or arenāt willing/able to take matters into your own hands, youāre screwed. And at this point the advisability of changing lawyers is unclear as, thanks to word being spread through NG, more lawyers and applicants are being more aggressive which is making the windows of opportunity smaller and smaller.
If the post at the top of this thread is at all accurate (14 months from application to biometrics appointment), that means things have actually sped up since I applied in 2017. This was way, way pre-covid. At that time, SEF was claiming 3-6 months from application to biometrics appointment. I waited just over 15 months! Yes, pre-pandemic. Iām now around six months overdue for my second renewal biometrics appointment.
Since Iām planning on moving to Portugal in 2022, I am seriously considering abandoning the GV and starting fresh with a D7 visa. Yes, that means starting the 5-year clock from the beginning, but at the rate things are moving, and the chaos that is sure to ensue in the coming perfect storm of SEF breakup combined with omicron pandemic, Iām anticipating another year or more will pass before I get my appointment (my lawyers sure arenāt helping). Since the D7 is mostly online and is obviously given higher priority by SEF and whatever office takes over, Iāll bet I get the citizenship faster by starting all over with a D7. Iām also exploring other European countries for visas, even though my intention is to live in Portugal.
You could try changing lawyers to see if you get someone that is better at getting appointments, maybe. I kind of get where you are coming from, but does the delay in the appointment really affect your 5-year aggregate clock? The citizenship app is going to take however long it takes and itās the same GV or D7 so youāre not losing anything there.
Donāt count me as an expert on this, but I donāt think you need to start over with a D7. As long as you donāt have a gap, you should be able to append your D7 residency time to your ARI residency time. Itās been discussed elsewhere in the forums and thatās the consensus based on a plain reading of the naturalization law.
Now, that is the best news Iāve heard in ages. I will look into this. Though as with everything regarding visas, nothing at all is clear.
When I first applied for a GV, the time until permanent residency and citizenship was six years. They changed the citizenship part to five years a few months after I finally got my first residency card. My lawyer was āquite certainā the shorter time applies to me. But Iām still worried that Iām stuck with the terms that applied at the time I was initially approved. Based on visa experiences in other countries, Iām still not entirely confident. When I lived in the UK 22 years ago on a professional visa with citizenship track, there was a major cock-up at the Immigration Department (they moved to a building across the street; thatās all it took to trigger disaster), which shut down the entire visa system for six months. When I enquired about switching to a different type of visa, they said that my residency clock would then be reset to zero (and, in fact, I and all foreign residents were barred from leaving the UK until Immigration sorted it out).
So, with SEF reorganization in the works, you can imagine the sense of deja vu Iām feeling.
My lawyer also absolutely insists that the timer counting toward five years stops on the day my current residency card expires, and then starts again when I get my next residency card, so I lose all the time in-between. This contradicts several statements Iāve seen on Nomad Gate, which claim the clock never stops until it reaches five years.
So, if I can switch midstream it could be a potential solution for my situationā¦if it turns out to be inequivocally true. So youāve given me some hope, and more research work to do.
P.S. Hereās how I resolved my visa situation in the UK all that time ago: I wrote to my local MP, who, bless his heart, contacted the Home Secretary on my behalf. Lo and behold, Immigration phoned me a week later to come pick up my familyās visas. When I walked in to the otherwise empty office, the civil servants behind the counter sneered at me: āYouāre the chap who wrote to Parliament.ā As if Iād cheated the system by forcing them to do their jobs.
I wonder if thereās any interest here in composing a joint letter to various officials and potentially sympathetic MPs in Portugal. I donāt see how it could hurt.
Hereās an update on our timing (family of four): Day 0 (mid-March) funded/applied. Pre-approval in late May (57 days). Three weeks after that, (mid-June) we completed all biometrics (traveled to Portugal for a month and grabbed any spots that opened). Yesterday, we heard from our lawyers that my wife and my residency had been approved. This was six months after biometrics (back in June, our lawyer had told us to expect 4-6 months). Iām not sure if this had anything to do with the recent announcement that SEF was shifting to a chronological approach to processing applications (another Matt D share this: SEF Scheduling Update). Weāre waiting to hear RE: our children. Weāre going to Portugal in a week, so it will be interesting to see if we can get some residency documentation before or while there.
that is interesting. Perhaps it is an issue that this gentleman from Brazil did not hire a lawyer and appoint a power of attorney to file application on his behalf. Maybe a POA is necessary to meet the legal requirements of the Act. Thus, if you file on your own without a power of attorney it is not compliant? It would be most enlightening to get clarification on this from an actual Portuguese lawyer.
Not sure how this old case would be applicable (or not) to todayās process.
Like many others here on the forum I submitted my application (āpedidoā) to the SEF portal without any lawyerās help or POA in place. The actual issuing (āconcessĆ£oā) of the residence authorization has not yet occurred, and to my knowledge is supposed to happen at the biometrics appointment, when I will be physically present in PT.
In fact, now you seem to have uncovered the mystery as to why SEF requires biometrics to be collected on the PT soil rather than overseas - it is probably to satisfy this Artigo 77?
Portugal does require presence in the national territory of at least 7 days per year. It seems that court case interpreted the requirement incorrectly and presence really means only 7 days a year not presence at the time of the application. In fact, the law does not mention presence āat the time of applicationā at all.
The case indicates that the personās application was submitted through his lawyer so presumably there was POA.
MM, the way this reads, you need to be present in portuguese territory to have the permit issued, but it doesnāt say when, these are all presented as pre-conditions, so itās not applying to the requirements for renewal (which is what the 7-day stuff is).
I did a little digging into some other stuff. I am guessing that if you look back circa 2015, there was no ARI portal at that time for a pre-approval, you applied in person and they took your biometrics all at once. Itās possible this personās lawyer was a cluebie, and went into the SEF office on POA and handed over the doc stack on the personās behalf since he already had plans and was in a hurry and didnāt want to be bothered having to go in himself until he got there, but they were also some Annoying Person that someone in the government decided was an UnDesirable and so they found a convenient technicality to use to boot them out on their ass.
If you think about this a little more. ARI portal leads to a pre-approval. However you still have to hand over physical documents at the time of the appointment. Why not mail them in? And then they review all your documents again after the fact - presumably they donāt sit around for weeks after the fact before issuing the approval for no good reason at all. (Sure, possible, but seems unlikely.) So maybe the portal and pre-approval is more of a ācan you please make sure youāve done at least the basics before you show up and bother us with your half-assed incomplete stack of paperworkā thing, and the true application for legal purposes is the biometric appointment, which is why all of the fuss of you having to fly to Portugal to do something that clearly could be done at embassies (and why the weird logistical shuffle the D7 goes through of doing all their paperwork through the embassy but still having to go stand in an SEF office in country). Itās stupid and trivial but a legal requirement that you have to be standing there in-country while on a valid visa when you physically hand them the doc stack. We can say this is stupid but itās just like the signature argument, thereās just these legal touchstones that we all have for various reasons and this is one of them.
Oh, and since I was wondering ā¦ Article 90-A of the act 23/2007, as amended by order 29/2012 (which is what inserts article 90-A into the act) specifically voids paragraph 1a of article 77 when applied to ARI, which explains why an ARI applicant can come in on a schengen visa, but a regular D7 holder has to do the really annoying shuffle-shuffle of doing all the paperwork at an embassy to get a short-stay visa to go in country to be able to stand in front of an SEF agent to submit their paperwork thereby fulfilling the requirement of paragraph 1c.
It is a BIATCH to assemble all of the orders into something useful to read.
Yes, i think what you are saying makes sense.
The ARI portal only came about in the last 3 years or so.
And, in fact, the process is called āpre-approvalā so perhaps that whole ARI submission is just a administrative step and you donāt submit the formal application until biometrics which explains why there is still a 4 month wait after biometrics to get actual approval/cards.
Whatās interesting here is that on the whole youāre subject to Article 77, the same as a D7 is. Which means youāre supposed to have āaccommodation ensuredā. Of course what this means isnāt defined in the act, itās explicitly defined as to be covered under regulatory orders (administrative fiat). But itās surprising that they donāt at least make you cough up a hotel receipt.
The was posted by @myakira earlier in this thread, and Iām in the exact same situation. Can someone clarify what we status we should expect to see on the ARI portal when the GV application gets pre-approved?
āMay I ask how your ARI portal page looked like when you received your preliminary approval? Does it say āAguarda Envioā with a Qr code next to it, and a Save button?
Today, my ARI portal changed from āAwaiting analysisā to āAguarda Envioā or
Awaiting Shippingā ( or it can also mean āAwaiting Submissionā in English). No idea what this āshippingā means. It seems it reverted to the initial stage or submission stage. Does anyone know?"
āAwaiting submissionā means they reverted it back to the initial stage due to some documents missing.
Check for any messages on the page as to which document may be missing.
Also check if you are able to upload documents.
Thanks @tommigun. As it turns out, my wifeās (dependent) application was pre-approved, and for mine, they want a bank statement. Now it also turns out that the document submission functionality on the ARI website isnāt working (per my lawyer), so they have to mail the document to ARIās headquarters, and Iāll get my pre-approval after.
