The saga of the Finnish residence permits

Here's a story that needs to be written down somewhere: how we got our Finland residency permits.

In May, we went to the Finnish embassy in Abu Dhabi to submit our applications for residence in Finland. My application was entered into their electronic system because I was the one with the invitation to work there. Jeremy and the kids had to do paper versions and mail them in. I got my decision (approved, obviously) by email within two weeks. Immigration said that the family's applications should be processed within four months, though of course we hoped to hear earlier. We especially hoped so because we were told over and over again that the residency cards would be sent to Abu Dhabi, and we'd have to go there to pick them up when they arrived. That would be a lot easier for us to do if we were in the UAE and not already in Finland.

May, June, and July went by with no word from immigration about the family's applications. It was a constant source of background stress, just simmering away in the back of our minds at all times. As August and our departure date to Finland approached, I checked in one last time with the embassy to see if they'd heard anything (nope!) and to confirm that my family could enter Finland on tourist visas even as they waited for the residence permit (not ideal, and we'd have to send someone to collect the permits for us when they came, but yep!). But with immigration stuff, you still kind of never know, which is why I almost had a heart attack at the Turku airport in August when the family's flight arrived but they didn't come through immigration for another hour. Turns out it was lost baggage and not denied entry, but it ratcheted up the stress yet again.

After we were all in Finland, we headed to the Maistraatti to register Jeremy and the kids (necessary for any further integration here, like enrollment in the health care system, or to get a bank account, etc.). They looked at our documents and said oh, we need apostilled copies of your marriage license and the birth certificates of your children in order to prove they are related to you. This was two things: 1. a surprise, since it seemed like something we should have been asked to do at the embassy in the UAE to begin with; and 2. a huge hassle. Those kind of documents take weeks to round up even when you're in the US, let alone outside of the country; to complicate matters, my marriage and the birth of my three children happened in four different places and I would therefore have to deal with four different offices to get apostilled copies of the documents. Furthermore, I actually already have attested copies of all those documents, which is a higher level of authentication than apostille, because that's what the UAE required way back when. But Finland needs apostille, not attestation, so we had to get it done all over again.

The process of gathering all the apostilled documents literally took months. God bless Vermont - I did it all online! But Arizona and Oregon required snail mail and phone calls, which my mom helped me with because she is awesome like that and doesn't bat an eye even at emails that include phrases like "and put THAT money order inside ANOTHER envelope and address THAT one to...." For Sterling's birth certificate, I had to do a separate process with the embassy in the UAE again, which took a long time but at least the lady I was emailing with was super helpful about it.

In the meantime, two things happened. First, I kept checking with the embassy in the UAE to see if our residence permits had come through (they hadn't). I kept thinking it was so strange that the first we'd heard of needing apostilled documents was after we arrived in Finland, rather than before. Second, I was reading some fine print on the immigration office's website and saw the part where if you applied for your residence permit and then traveled to Finland on a tourist visa, after 90 days, if you don't have your residence permit, you have to leave. Um, WHAT? My mind immediately filled with visions of Jeremy and the kids being deported on November 18th, 90 days after they arrived. Where were their residence permits?? They could make all our problems go away.

Jeremy, bless his heart, recommended I ask the university's international staff services liaison for help. I had been thinking that our contact at the embassy in the UAE was our best bet, so I hadn't bothered with someone in Turku. But now we were desperate - it was mid-October by this point and time was running out for my family's residence permits to arrive and solve all our problems. Oh, and the newspapers that month were filled with headlines about immigration wait times being hugely impacted by the refugee crisis and while I didn't grudge any Syrians their safe harbor in Finland, it definitely upped the background stress level.

(Like that time when there was that anthrax attack that shut down the US mail system in 2001 and it was the exact time I was sending out wedding invitations. I completely understand that my business is not a priority in those situations...but still.)

So I got in contact with international staff services here, and they got in contact with immigration, and it turns out that way back in June - June!!!! - immigration sent me an email asking me to get my marriage license and kids' birth certificates apostilled. The decision on the residence permits had been waiting on completion of that task, all this time! I felt sick to my stomach when I read that. For whatever reason, I never received the email. Now it all made sense - why I'd been caught off guard by the request to get the documents apostilled after we'd arrived in Finland; why the residence permits hadn't been approved yet.

And so the race was on: which would come first, all my apostilled documents from the US, or the day my family would officially be overstaying their visas in Finland?

Thanks to some frantic scanning of the documents in the US by my mom as soon as she received them and before she sent the copies to me by mail; and a similarly heroic scanning of Sterling's apostilled birth certificate by a lady in the Finnish embassy in the UAE, and a kind-hearted acceptance of the scans by immigration in the meantime while they waited for the hard copies, and some smart, blessed person deciding to throw beaureaucratic procedure to the wind and mail the residence permits to us in Finland instead of all the way back to the UAE...my family got their residence permits. The girls' permits came on 16 November and Jeremy's and Sterling's came on the 18th, the actual day their visas expired.

And now we are a very happy, very relieved, very together family in Finland!