Tags , ,
Time for an update on what’s happened … But first, for those so-called experts in the various online Expat Forums who keep telling us “you’re doing it wrong” because we did things in a different order than them, and got our “llegadas” the day we walked into Migraciones without yet the INTERPOL, Health, or formal financial documentation: Mark’s Uruguay “Cédula de Identidad Nacional” Yes it’s “Provisional” and I (as well as Lisa Marie) have the status of “Residente en Trámite” – a Resident in Processing. But this, friends, is what they would call back in the USA a “Green Card”. I also love how the Uruguay cédula has an image of South America, with Uruguay’s location circled, because otherwise nobody knows where we are. So here’s what we did to get our cédulas: Simply get our USA-issued and legalized-in-USA-by-Uruguay birth certificates translated by a Uruguayan Public Translator. Note – these documents were not yet “legalized” in Uruguay by the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry (MRREEMinistry of States outside), nor yet filed They Were With The Uruguayan Civil Registry (Registry Office of the State), THUS We Could Have not yet partidadas Uruguay (Uruguayan birth certificates). Yet every expat "expert" will tell you That is the exact thing you has to do, in That sequence. Or they'll just complain about "all the stamps and fees you need". Go to the DNIC (National Identity Direcion Civil), pay 156 pesos (About eight dollars US) for an appointment to get our ID cards, Which They Offered as soon as That afternoon. We chose the next day for our convenience. Go to the appointment we set-up for the next day. Check in, wait to be called, straightforward answer some factual questions, get picture taken, fingerprinted, and get the receipt to come back and pick it up a week later. Come back and pick it up a week later. Without Having to wait in any lines at all to do so. The "week-later" is true for Uruguayan Citizens too, other than children get WHOsame-day service due to the burden for their parents to come in with them twice. It’s not something singled out for expats the way the bloggy whiners complain about without factual knowledge. Of course I had read their , and knew more or less what to expect. As well as having read and synthesized a lot of info from different blogs and , without considering it as a hard-and-fast ‘recipe’. (That wiki is a great resource, but it still has a “this is the order you have to do things” misunderstanding and a sense of “you just need a bunch of stamps and numbers” lack of insight to the reasoning behind the process.) We could have had our cédulas the day after we got our “llegadas” in mid-June – except that our updated US birth certificates (recent issued ones) had not come back from the Uruguay Consulate-General in our region of the USA yet by the time I got on the plane back to Uruguay in June. When I returned temporarily to the States in late June, they had been there a few days already.Those, and official translation of them, was the only missing link to our provisional “Green Cards”. By the way, as of October 14, 2012, Uruguay no longer does “legalization” of documents, but rather has , of which most but not all countries already belong (Canada is a big one that still doesn’t.) So they will no longer “legalize” documents from the USA, which was a two-step process: 1) Send the recent birth/marriage cert to the Uruguayan Consulate-General in the US, at the consulate that covers the part of the USA the document was issued in (not the region where you now live), and 2) In Uruguay, take that document to the Uruguayan Ministry of Foreign Relations Consular Services section to have it “Legalized” in Uruguay. Now, you get New York or Massachusetts or California themselves to issue a new certificate and have it “Apostilled” by the Secretary of State of that USA state. That in itself makes it legal in any country that is part of the . Our updated Marriage Certificate is rightin the middle of that Uruguay changeover. New York took too long to issue it, before I came back here permanently in mid-September after disposing of our condo in Colorado. My daughter got the forwarded mail and kindly sent it to the Consulado-General in New York City, along with the money order for legalization, exactly what I did with the birth certs a few months earlier. But Uruguay by then said “sorry, we don’t do legalization for USA anymore, go get a new certificate with an Apostille and it’s good in Uruguay.” So yes, we got our cédulas even without any legal-in-Uruguay marriage certificate too! Including them recognizing that Lisa Marie Mercer is the same person as Lisa Marie <redacted-maiden-name-for-USA-identity-theft-protection>, because of course her birth cert has her maiden name, and in Uruguay women do not change their surname ever. Yet our application for residency was based on her passport name, Mercer, and the “llegada” thus had a different name than the birth cert forthe cédula. Not a problem with the very nice people at DNIC – our over-two-decades-old marriage certificate, un-translated, un-legalized, un-apostilled, and one of our wedding invitations (I’m a hopeless romantic and had brought it with me) was enough to do it! When you go on the expat blogs, (not ours! though we’re members of that group), and the like, do carefully read what people have written about their experiences and their understanding of the process. There is good info there. But don’t take it as gospel, definitely not as universal truth. Many people, too many, improperly universalize their experiences as “the way it works”. Or because they are unable to create a mental model of what the process they are experiencing is (really, too lazy to do so), and thus have chosen to be non-understanding, they just moan about the difficulty and bureaucracy of it. Or, they throw money at law firms in the business of doing it all for them. Of which I mostly hear regrets or at least adisturbing lack of the expat/immigrant his/herself having any clue of what is happening to them. I suppose that’s ok for some people. But they’re frankly not the kind of people for whom we are writing this blog. We’re writing for intelligent, aware, involved people. Need help, need advice, need somebody to handle some parts of the process, confused about something, that’s fine. But the “I just don’t understand and don’t want to understand and who do I pay to make all this happen?” – please go somewhere else, such as to the law firm that charges $3500 US, NOT including the actual fees paid to Uruguay and to agencies, per person. No I’m not going to link to them! In the USA I was an introductory-level Professional Ski Instructor. Our professional organization, the PSIA (), in recent years moved away from the concept of strict progressions in favor of – multiple pathways from a beginning to a desired goal, with many tasks/skills to master, but different paths through them. And nomandatory sequence other than what is inherently logically required: e.g. you can’t learn to slide on level ground on skis before you learned to stand & balance on skis, and you can’t learn to stand & balance on skis before you learned to put on skis. But other stepping stones could be done in differing orders – I might for some student guests construct a progression of sliding downhill without first learning to stop (Yes that is ok!) if I selected terrain that had a flat or uphill runout, letting them get the thrill of the sport early in their experience, without yet worrying about speed control techniques. Others, if I felt they were fearful, or if we had a crowded teaching area, would get some basic stopping before we got going. Getting your Uruguay Residency is like that, in my opinion and thus far in my and Lisa’s experience. Yes, the “official” (as far as the expat experts profess) order is a) get all your documents, legalizations, translations, health exams, police records,financial proofs ready, b) go to Migraciones to request an appointment “para inciar”, c) present everything at that appointment which is several months after you request it, and d) if they like all your documents, they will issue you the “Certificado de Llegada” as an in-process resident that lets you get your cédula. Months after you start. And you must have presented the legalized (now Apostiled) and legally-translated originating-country birth and marriage certificates, your Carné de Salud health certificate, and they must have received back from the FBI or Scotland Yard or wherever your police records, before they will issue that. Yeah, that’s the official story. Or, you could give the country the courtesy of actually attempting to understand what they want, and: a) create your hand-crafted, personally written with secondary-school Spanish for authenticity, letter of request to change your category from tourist to resident (something the experts often forget or useobvious-paid-lawyer impersonal boilerplate), b) put together an unofficial portfolio and explanation of your freelance work, no escribana yet involved, c) go without an appointment to Migraciones, and d) perhaps the very nice and helpful people there will say to you “Quiere obtener su cédula ya?” (do you want to get your cédula already?), while also making your first “official” appointment for months later. Sure, we need all the regular items before our rescheduled-to-April “official initiation” appointment – but we already have what would be in US-equivalent terms our provisional “Green Cards”, what in Immigration Canada terms is “landed immigrant” status. I got our birth certificates legalized in Uruguay a couple of weeks ago (they were legalized pre-Apostille-joining back in the USA earlier this year) Next day, I filed them in the Civil Registry. They should be officially on file and available for us to request Uruguay birth certificates by the end of this month. But Migracionessaid they don’t need the certificates, and they already saw my receipts for filing them, when we went to our Nov 1 “iniciar” appointment with our cédulas already in hand, to request a postponed appointment. Yesterday I went to get my Uruguayan medical exam for the Carné de Salud. I will be given the Carné as soon as I provide them proof of my 2009 tetanus vaccination – if my US doctor (US Federal Law on health records access and privacy) and releases them directly to me as I requested. If not, I’ll need an unnecessary-but-cheap new shot at one of the local clinics. Lisa will need the same, as well as the free-for-all-women Pap smear and mammogram that are mandated as human health rights by Uruguay. We’ll get around to the INTERPOL Montevideo request to the FBI sometime in the next month. So by April we’ll have everything we need. Oh, but what about that freelance income proof? We will likely still put together our confusing dozens-monthly Elance direct deposits in US accounts, PayPaland Google Wallet payments into an understandable cash-flow for an escribana, so as to get a letter verifying we make enough to live on. We do want to have that, given it’s the basis on which we got our approval for the provisional residency on our Day 1 walk-in meeting. But it’s now moot – because Monday morning I start a “Real Job”, paid in pesos, as a Senior Technical Writer (in English) for the ecommerce division of a major Silicon Valley cloud software company, based at their ecommerce development hub here in Montevideo – with a “job letter” that is fine with Migraciones. A job which I was able to apply for, after they found me, because I had already obtained approval for provisional residency. Out of order, out of sequence, not relying on the “experts”. And with no lawyers, no expediters, no professional-get-your-residency types involved at all. The only thing we have paid other than the exact fees to government agencies and photocopy costs, is $1000 pesos, USS 50 per birthcertificate for official translations by a licensed Public Translator, along with 200 pesos for two official “timbre” stamps she provided to make them legal. On Monday, I become a Uruguayan taxpaying employee, a productive member of the Uruguayan economy, a member of the social welfare BPS system, with my employer’s BPS payments on my behalf going towards paying for our choice of mutualistas, for health care above and beyond the baseline national health to which we are already entitled with our cédulas. Without following everything in slavish sequence. Now we’re not promising this will happen the same way for you as it has for us, but think about it – what’s our big “trick”? No trick at all. It’s understanding and respecting the process. As opposed to thinking it’s some big inefficient “typical South American bunch of funcionarios who ” disrespect. Or as opposed to paying big bucks to somebody to “take care of everything” while you remain in the dark. Save to read later: Like this:Like Loading...