The IND (the Dutch immigration folk) have a spiffy website. They have an 0900 number with friendly and cheerful staff. They have all the documents you need as pdf downloads, usually in both Dutch and English. And so I am regularly, consistently, and enormously surprised at the regular, consistent, and enormous gap between what I think I ought to be doing with regard to my residency situation and what I actually should be doing.

Here’s what I thought was going on. I’ve been here a little over six years, on short-term permits, and after five years one can apply for a permit for unlimited residency. But I didn’t do that, because they do income tests that I couldn’t meet. My current permit is tied to my appointment at the university, which ran out January 1st. But since I became Dr de Jager quite recently, I could apply under the rules for “Highly educated recent graduates”, granting a year to look for work. If I found a good enough job in that year, that would give me the income to use the five-year rule to get permanent residency (or near-as-dammit).

Almost every single statement in the above summary is wrong.

First up, the five-year rule doesn’t apply to my first two years here, which were officially under a study exchange programme with New Zealand. It also wouldn’t apply to a “work-seeking” year, which in any case I couldn’t apply for because while I did graduate here my permit at the time was for work, not study.1

Secondly, in order to apply the five-year rule I would have to continue working, on the same kind of permit I have now, for five years. This probably would have been possible, if I had known about it in advance: another semester of teaching would have done it. But I didn’t, and now it’s too late. Because:

Thirdly, and most importantly, the five-year rule involves a most strict attention to continuous legal residency: the one and a half months between the end of my previous permit and the date of my application for a new one would reset my accumulated residency to zero.

Oops.

(The same rules apply to work: lacking a contract for the month of February would interfere just as much as lacking a residence permit for January.)

Perhaps you can imagine my distress at this news. It must have been quite a sight, because the nice lady at the IND, after explaining this to me twice, had to go off and fetch some backup.

The first thing the backup asked me was if I had a girlfriend. (You might think, given my beardy good looks and charming personality, that I would get this sort of thing rather often; if you thought that, you would be surprised to learn that in fact I don’t. Pretty much never, in fact, and especially not from government employees during working hours.) Somewhat bemused, I answered that yes, I did. Was she Dutch? No, Greek. Even better! Did she live here? Yes, we live together. Problem solved!

As a family member of an EU citizen registered as a Dutch resident, I am entitled to a five-year residence and work permit. (As an added bonus, at the end of those five years I can apply for permanent residency.) We have to prove that we’re an honest-truly couple, but we don’t have to be married. (There are plenty of good reasons to get married, but “because I need a residence permit” is not one of them.) It will cost €41, instead of €331 (!).

In some ways it’s almost a disappointment. I had the vague idea that after working at a university for four years, and doing an MSc and a PhD at Dutch institutions, the qualifications I had accumulated might help argue the case for letting me live in the country. Instead it’s who I’m sleeping with that makes the difference.

So much for the knowledge economy.

Notes:

  1. Slightly more complicated, for those really keeping track: under a related rule I could indeed apply for a zoekjaar, but it would force me to get a separate work permit, which is a terrible pain. One of the major attractions of the permanent residency option is to be able to work wherever, rather than constantly having to have my contracts approved by the immigration folk. [↪]