We reached an important bureaucratic milestone today. After some eight months of letters back and forth between us and the IND, we finally received word today of their decision to grant Sarah her application for a verblijfsvergunning (residence permit).
She’s been granted an initial period of one year, backdated to the date that the application was submitted. The bureaucratic road has been meandering for so long, that this means she has but four more months until the permit will need to be renewed. Exactly how much renewed bureaucracy will ensue at that time remains to be seen, but I’m hopeful that, once granted, the permit will be considerably easier to renew than it is to initially obtain.
Much, if not all, of the awkwardness in our case was caused by the fact that Sarah’s sponsor (that’s me, her husband) is unemployed. The IND is simply not set up to deal with applications from people whose sponsors are not working, a student, an au-pair, a man of the cloth, a diplomat, a foreign journalist, etc., etc.
Proving that I could ensure that Sarah would not be a burden on the Dutch state was thus not as easy as simply producing an employment contract. Instead, I had to show evidence of independent means. Things got an order of magnitude messier when, after demonstrating that I could financially support Sarah, the IND tried to disqualify our assets from consideration by pointing out that no Dutch tax had been paid on them. The fact that no Dutch tax was yet due on them seemed to them to be an irrelevant detail.
When I pointed out that they could not reasonably expect me to prove that I had paid tax that was not yet due and thus could not yet be paid, they conceded, but then immediately countered by demanding to see a copy of the 2004 tax return that I had filed whilst living in the US.
It’s a game of chess, you see? Since governmental departments are a monopoly (you can’t just go to a competitor and get a residence permit from them), you have no choice but to deal with them. And no matter how stupid and time-consuming each of their requests is, the only pragmatic course of action is to comply with it.
I don’t often recommend the path of least resistance, but where bureaucratic governmental departments are concerned, it’s the only sane choice. You see, each request with which you comply effective removes another chess piece from the board. Ultimately, after you have fulfilled each and every one of their requests, there will be nothing left to ask of you, except perhaps that you bring back a piece of the moon on your next trip.
Anyway, the whole process ultimately took so long that our 2005 taxes eventually did become due in The Netherlands. Predictably, the IND responded by requesting a copy of the filing, which I duly supplied. And with that manoeuvre, I captured their queen and put their king in checkmate. As I said, we’ll be having a rematch at the end of August.
So Sarah now has to wait for the local council to contact for with an appointment to pick up her shiny new residence permit. Once she has that, the whole process of inburgering will be just around the corner. They like to keep life interesting over here.