Worker, retiree or investor: What type of Spanish visa do I need?

The Local – 27 May 2022

If you’re from a non-EU country you will need a visa in order to stay in Spain for longer than 90 days, but knowing which type of permit is best for you can be tricky. Here's how to find the right one for you based on your circumstances.

If you are a citizen of a non-EU country then you may benefit from the 90-day rule, allowing you to visit Spain for 90 days out of every 180 without needing a visa. Countries including the UK, USA, Canada and Australia all benefit from this rule.

Citizens of certain countries require a visa even for a short trip.

However, the tricky part comes when you want to move to Spain and spend longer than just those three months. What are your visa options, whether you want to move to Spain to retire, to work or even to set up your own business? 

Retirees:

The best option for retirees is to apply for the non-lucrative visa (NLV). This allows you to live in Spain for one year, but as the name suggests you are not allowed to work.

In order to apply an applicant must show they have €27,792 at their disposal for one year (€34,740 if it’s a couple), as well as comprehensive health insurance.

If you want to stay in Spain beyond this year, you can either renew it for a further two years (again proving you have the financial means) or change your visa for a work permit or a self-employed permit through the residence modification process.

The NLV is also the best option for those who want to live abroad temporarily. Those who want to stay in Spain for more than three months, but are not planning on living here permanently. It’s ideal for those on a sabbatical for example who have savings or investments and who do not need to work in Spain while here, but want to stay here for a year. It’s also the best option for those who have the financial means to do so.

 

If you plan on moving to Spain for work or in order to look for a job, then you will need a work permit. Unfortunately getting a work permit can be tricky because in most cases as a non-EU national, the position you apply for must be on Spain’s shortage occupation list.

Your employer will also have to prove that there were no other suitable candidates within the EU to be able to fulfill the vacancy. This means that only highly skilled workers or those that work in industries that need workers are likely to be successful. These mostly include jobs in the maritime or fishing industries or sports coaches.

If you are wanting to become self-employed, then the entrepreneur visa could be a good option, allowing you to live in Spain for one year in order to open up a business. Be aware however your business must be considered as anything of innovative character with special economic interest for Spain.

You will have to prove you have the necessary qualifications to set up your business and will also have to submit your business plan to the authorities for it to be approved. The entrepreneur visa can be extended for a further two years after your initial one has been granted.

Investors:

If money is no object and you want to invest in a Spanish property then, you’ll want to apply for Spain’s golden visa. To be eligible, you must invest €500,000 before taxes in a property here. It won’t allow you to work, but it will allow you access to the entire Schengen area. This will also allow your spouse and any dependent children to move to Spain with you.

Another option for investors is the entrepreneur visa as described above, if you want to use your investment to set up a business in Spain.

Joining family members:

If you happen to have a family member who is an EU citizen and lives in Spain or a non-EU relative that has residency in Spain, then you have another option. This is called the family reunification visa. However, in order to be eligible, you need to be a spouse or a dependent child and your relative must have the means to financially support you. 

Students:

Enrolling on a course and applying for a student visa is one way for non-EU citizens of any age can live in Spain beyond the regular length of a tourist stay. 

You will have to apply for a short-term or long-term student visa, depending on the length of their course. A student advantages can several advantages such as being able to work part-time or bringing over family members. 

www.samigration.com

 

 

Foreigners "ready for war" against Operation Dudula. Look at what they are saying

The Citizen – 27 May 2022

In April, following the death of Operation Dudula member, Kgomotso Diale, residents of Pimville expressed their disappointment in the government and the police for failing to protect them against crime. Diale was shot and killed by illegal foreigners after a confrontation about cable theft. Police Minister, Bheki Cele had to visit the area where residents got to speak directly to him.

Leader of Operation Dudula, Nhlanhla Lux, gave Cele a strong warning, saying that if the informal settlements in Soweto are not removed in 30 days, the community will rise and ensure they are removed. Lux also made demands that the Police Minister should charge politicians who encouraged people to grab land. "If these illegal immigrants are not out of the squatter camps by May 28, it will be a Saturday, you might as well prepare a mass funeral because we are going guns blazing", Nhlanhla said right in front of Bheki Cele.

May 28 is almost here. It's only five days to go until informal settlements housing illegal foreigners are removed in Pimville and Soweto. However, the foreign nationals say they are not going anywhere and they are ready to fight. According to The Citizen, the imigrants said they would not be bullied by people who fail to hold their government responsible for corruption and failure to deliver services. The foreigners are saying South Africans are weak, hence government is doing as it pleases with them.

It is only in SA where foreigners will plot to go in war with citizens. Ramaphosa is neglecting South Africans and there will be war. When Kgomotso Diale was shot, the foreigners were not scared of anyone. They were heavily armed and shooting at South Africans who were unarmed. They have been raging war against South Africans for some time now, it's only now that they have decided to publicly declare so. If now they say they are ready for war, what are their plans? What measures is government taking to ensure at there is no war?They say they will not be bullied by people who fail to hold their government to account? But they are here in SA, running away from their own governments which have been buying them.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, HomeAffairsSA Immigration Officials were on the ground to ensure that those within Gauteng province especially from the neighbouring countries have proper documentation as required by law.

www.samigration.com

 

 

 

German teachers working in SA pins their hopes on Chancellor’s visit

27 May 2022, - @SABCNews

Some German teachers in South Africa say they hope the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will discuss the challenges of visas and their work permits.

President Cyril Ramaphosa is hosting the German Chancellor on an official visit at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Tuesday.

Both leaders are expected to discuss issues of bilateral and global concerns including ways to enhance cooperation in the areas of energy and climate change among others.

Germany is South Africa’s second-largest trading partner and in tourism the third-largest single source for overseas arrivals. And trade and investment have been central to bilateral relations between the two countries with at least 600 German companies doing business in the country. With the country’s total trade with Germany estimated at around R266 billion, President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to use the visit to increase the trade volumes.

Presidential spokesperson, Tyrone Seale explains, “President Ramaphosa and Chancellor Scholz will exchange views on a number of issues of bilateral and international concern, including ways to enhance cooperation in areas such as energy and climate change, trade and investment, and responses to COVID-19 and vaccine demand. They will also reflect on developments on the African continent and internationally, including the conflict in Ukraine and its impact on the international economy and food and energy security.”

But the Germans working in South Africa are also pinning their hopes on the visit of their Chancellor. Teachers at the German International School in Johannesburg want their Chancellor to exchange notes on how to turn the energy crisis in South Africa around, insisting the intermittent power outage disrupts their teaching and learning.

“Some challenges such as load shedding, we are a quite a modern school we use digital boards, projectors and a lot of computers and this is a challenge when it comes to stage three and stage four. So we’re losing some lessons.”

“Me and my husband are trying solar energy to be independent of the grid but anyway you need to get used to it and the circumstances and sometimes it’s just nice and romantic to sit in the candle as well.”

The German International School in Johannesburg is one of the three in the country and has an enrolment of over 1 000 learners with 80 percent of them being local with at least 20 percent of them not paying any fees as they are from poor family backgrounds mainly from Soweto.

The School principal, Thomas Bachmeier says they are also struggling with their visas and work permits and want the Chancellor to help them with this challenge.

Principal at the German International School Thomas Bachmeier says, “Work permit for people from Germany and is also a challenge like I said 10 to 15 percent of our teachers need to come from Germany and sometimes is delayed and sometimes we struggle to get a renewal on time.”

And the sentiments are also shared by teachers alike. Tanja Henrichs says with their school being virtually free for learners from poor backgrounds like Soweto, they want government to allow more German learners into the country and for their work permits renewal to be fast-tracked.

“We don’t have many German learners, we need to learn the language easy for all our children and we have learners from 30 nations and most of them don’t have German at home so it would be nice to have some more German teachers but it’s easy with the political situation nowadays. For us is difficult to get visas and to get contracts and is very important for us that politicians are set into a frame so that we work efficiently together.”

Both President Ramaphosa and Chancellor Scholz will also join the South Africa-German consortium that will advance technology research for the production of sustainable aviation fuels. I am Ntebo Mokobo in Johannesburg.

www.samigration.com

 

 

"South Africans do not want the jobs that are being performed by immigrants" says Athandiwe Saba.

Twitter – 27 May 2022

No matter where you talk about the lack of jobs that South Africans are facing or the skyrocketing crime rate, the bottom line is that the words "illegal" and "immigrant" will come up. There are a large number of people from other countries who are here without proper documentation and are competing with citizens for everything; jobs; service delivery; and are also involved in crimes such as pickpocketing, cash transit heists, and ATM bombing, which are negatively affecting the economy of this country. View pictures in App save up to 80% data.

According to Athandiwe Saba's tweet: "Despite claims that foreigners are taking jobs, research has found evidence to the contrary." "We also discovered during our research that South Africans generally do not want jobs performed by migrants, such as hairdressing." She continued.

 People in the comments section were outraged by the research findings, with some asking who was doing that kind of job before the foreigners arrived. Of course, it was the locals, and they are still out there looking for work, but they are having no luck because the positions have already been filled by foreign nationals.

Employers hire illegal immigrants for a variety of reasons, the most notable of which is that they are known to be inexpensive, allowing employers to save a significant amount of money by hiring them. Another reason is that they are unable to register with unions, making them an easy target for unfair treatment in the workplace.

 Below are some of the comments from the people on Twitter:

"Despite your claims that South Africans don't want those jobs, we did research and discovered that every company that employs foreign nationals has CV's belonging to South Africans, e.g. Engen, Wimpy, etc," a Twitter user says. .

 Let's start with who did the research. The fact that South Africans have CV's does not imply that they did not want the jobs; the company may reject SAns by claiming they are not skilled when they apply and instead hire foreign nationals. What are the reasons for South African CVs being overlooked? " A Twitter user stated.

www.samigration.com

 

 

 

MPs rip into Motsoaledi over department’s ‘sins’ – long queues, offline systems and shambolic immigration service

Daily Maverick - 26 May 2022

Details of how Home Affairs planned to reduce queues were laid out by Minister Aaron Motsoaledi in his budget vote speech, but he largely dodged South Africa’s immigration fiasco, simply saying a complete overhaul was in the offing as the main opposition parties gave him short shrift over our poorly managed, porous borders.

In his budget vote speech on Tuesday, Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi outlined a 12-point plan to increase efficiency and reduce the long queues outside the department’s offices – but chronic staff shortages will remain.

Long queues were one of two “elephants in the room”, said Motsoaledi, the other being immigration. But he dealt with immigration in just two short paragraphs, although it received the most heated criticism from the main opposition parties.

A lack of staff at the civic services branch contributes to the excessively long queues. In 2021, Home Affairs director-general Tommy Makhode told Parliament only 37% of civic services posts at Home Affairs were filled, with no budget available to fill 9,025 vacant posts in the branch that provides identity documents, passports, birth and death certificates and marriage licences to citizens.

Daily Maverick has been highlighting how citizens across the country struggle to obtain the documents they need to work and travel, revealing day-long queues in Johannesburg, Stellenbosch and Cape Town.

On Tuesday, Motsoaledi revised the current percentage of filled posts to 39%, saying an additional allocation of R266-million within the R9,4-billion budget for the 2022/23 financial year to deal with the staffing crisis would allow the staff complement to be increased to 42% of what is required to serve the 412 Home Affairs offices nationwide.

He said that over the past five years Treasury had “slapped a ceiling” on the budget for staff salaries, which resulted in people who left the department’s employ not being replaced. Added to this were severe budget cuts over the past two years as money had to be moved to health facilities to fight Covid-19.

But now Treasury “came to the party”, he said, enabling the department to hire 764 new employees. Of these, 517 will be front-office staff processing applications for documents such as ID cards and passports, and 288 will be new immigration officers. 

Banking on help

But no number of staff could reduce the queues if the “original sin” of the department’s systems being offline was not addressed. 

To this end, the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) was spending R400-million to revamp the entire network. The procurement process had just been completed and the work would be concluded towards the end of 2022.

SITA was also increasing the department’s bandwidth, had doubled its internet capacity and introduced three failovers (back-up systems) in Tshwane, Cape Town and eThekwini.

Nevertheless, SITA’s efforts did not seem to be sufficient. Motsoaledi said the department “stood in awe” of the banks who never seemed to suffer from system downtime, and was bringing eight IT engineers from “a leading bank” to help stabilise the Home Affairs network and install some key IT infrastructure. These specialists had been vetted and would soon start working with the department.

Home Affairs was already partnering with major banks, establishing a Home Affairs desk at 28 branches. However, the relationship was fraught, since capturing client details and biometrics at the branches relied on the Home Affairs system being online. With so much downtime, it affected the banks’ reputations.

“We believe that as soon as their own engineers have helped us to increase system uptime, the banks will cheerfully open their doors for Home Affairs services,” said Motsoaledi.

Load shedding also added to the department’s connectivity woes, and generators had been installed in 197 Home Affairs offices. But 215 offices remained at Eskom’s mercy.

The online booking system, piloted at 24 offices, was also aimed at reducing queues. It allowed citizens to make an appointment online and then arrive at the office at the appointed time, avoiding the need to queue. Since it was initiated in December 2021, 33,463 had used it as of 13 May.

Borders blasted

However, GOOD MP Brett Herron warned that the appointment booking system discriminated against the poor who could not afford data to book online, while efficient front offices remained a priority.

Almost all opposition MPs remarked on the long queues and people being turned away after waiting a whole day to apply for documents securing their ability to work, study, obtain social grants or travel. But the strongest criticism was levelled at Home Affairs’ immigration branch and porous borders which are attractive to criminal networks.

Both African Transformation Movement MP Vuyolwethu Zungula and IFP MP Liezl van der Merwe mentioned reports that South Africa’s shambolic border management allowed the Islamic State group to obtain funding from businesses run by illegal migrants.

“We do not have borders, the current manual asylum seeker system has collapsed and has been abused by economic migrants,” said Van der Merwe.

She shot down Motsoaledi’s announcement that the establishment of the Border Management Authority (BMA) was “well under way”, with recruitment of the first cohorts of border guards completed. In April 2022 it would become a standalone schedule 3A public entity responsible for our borders.

“The BMA is not the panacea to our problems,” said Van der Merwe. “It will take millions of rands we don’t have, and many more years to become fully operational.”

According to the budget summary, immigration affairs was allocated R1,5-billion, compared with R2,6-billion for citizen affairs and R2,3-billion for administration.

Motsoaledi had little to say about immigration. Beyond the announcement of the BMA, he said it was a crisis “we are all well aware of” and it would need its own budget speech if he were to start to outline it.

“For today, it will suffice to say we have decided on a complete overhaul of the immigration system of the country,” he said, adding that this work was well under way and would soon be unveiled. 

EFF MP Lorato Tito and DA MP Adrian Roos tore into the immigration debacle, with Roos saying the “ineffective” BMA was simply creating “millionaire managers” with “Land Cruisers and uniforms” who could not find people illegally crossing the border yet a Carte Blanche camera crew could. Further, the BMA was simply replacing senior managers in immigration who were supposed to be doing that job but remained employed.

Roos said the Stockpoort border post between South Africa and Botswana remained closed because Port Health was not able to implement Covid-19 protocols, resulting in businesses in Stockpoort closing and the bureau de change retrenching staff.

Tito said xenophobic sentiment resulting in the killing of foreigners such as Zimbabwean Elvis Nyathi, was stoked by Home Affairs failing to provide services on South Africa’s borders.

Not all bad

One successful achievement, however, which opposition MPs generally seemed to agree on, was Home Affairs’ deployment of mobile offices. With about 100 in operation and 15 more being procured this financial year, they had been successfully deployed to flood-ravaged areas in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, enabling people who had lost their identity documents to obtain new ones with the usual costs waived. 

Deputy Home Affairs Minister Njabulo Nzuza said the mobile units had serviced 131,164 citizens in the last financial year. They were particularly useful for rural and remote areas not serviced by Home Affairs offices, and for targeting Grade 12s so they could write their exams in possession of a new smart ID card.

Nzuza said the number of pupils writing Grade 12 exams without an ID card had been reduced from 8,187 in 2020 to 2,560 in the 2021 academic year. 

The department had a target of registering 90% of all births within 30 days by 2024, he said. To achieve this, they wanted to expand Home Affairs’ birth registration sites to all 1,145 health facilities in the country with maternity wards. Currently, only 391 had birth registration capabilities. 

However, Roos warned there needed to be an indigent programme to waive the DNA testing fees required to establish paternity in the case of absent fathers, or where one of the parents was a foreigner.

He said he was aware of a case where the child of a Swazi mother and South African father was not given an ID because the father could not afford a DNA test to prove the child was his. The lack of an indigent programme meant the mother and child faced generational poverty because the child would not be able to acquire education or employment without an ID.

www.samigration.com