A few weeks ago we received our residency permits from l’Office Francaise de l’Immigration et de l’Integration. These allow us to live in France legally for the next year.
The permits are the end-result of the process that began over 6 months ago when we committed to moving to Paris and started working with the immigration attorneys. We started out by filling out a stack of forms and submitting them to the French government, along with copies of our passports, birth certificates, marriage certificate and a number of passport-sized photos, along with other documents related to J’s work assignment. In June we were told that we would have our visas in 4 to 6 weeks, but this estimate turned out to be wildly optimistic. There had been no progress by August, which is the month when pretty much everyone in France goes on vacation, so nothing happened until September. Even after everyone was back from vacation there were further delays. When our application was finally approved by the Labor Ministry, some mysterious force was preventing them from forwarding the approved documents to the Migration Office. Our lawyers intervened to fix that problem, but then we had to wait for the documents to travel from the Migration Office in Paris to the French Consulate in Chicago. We were getting uncomfortably close to our planned move date of the last week in September, but the paperwork finally reached the consulate about 3 months after the whole process began.
Our local French Consulate was responsible for actually issuing our temporary visas, but that could only happen after an in-person visit, which was ultimately scheduled for my last day of work in mid-September. Before the appointment, we had received three different lists of documents we needed to bring with us: one from the French Consulate’s website, one in an email from the consulate and one from our attorneys. Of course all three lists were different. We showed up nervously clutching multiple copies of everything on all three lists, plus whatever else I could think of that might be relevant. Despite all of this preparation, we merely needed to drop off our passports, sign a few papers, have our picture taken, and we were back out on the street within thirty minutes. After waiting so long to get to the point where we could set up that appointment, it seemed like a good sign it had gone so well. Of course there was still one last delay: we couldn’t just pick up our passports, but had to wait for them to be mailed back to us. We got them back the following week, with 3-month visas pasted into the pages. We sent scans of the visas back to the attorneys and focused our attention on the move and the next steps of finding a place to live in Paris.
Proof of a permanent address in France was one of the items we needed in order to get a residency permit. When we signed the lease on our apartment here in Paris, we sent a copy of our lease and our utility bills to the attorneys. We also needed new photographs because neither the many U.S. passport-sized photographs that we had already submitted with our application nor the photographs taken by the French Consulate in Chicago were the correct size for the residency permit application. Luckily most train stations in Paris have photo booths that produce photographs that are the right size for government documents and IDs.
We soon received another stack of paperwork from the attorneys. We had to sign our applications for residency permits and send the signed copies back to the attorneys. We were very sternly warned that we needed to sign the applications inside of a particular box, and the application would be rejected if even one line of our signatures was outside of the box. The attorneys had left nothing to chance and blocked off the area around the signature box with sticky notes. Luckily, we both possess the fine motor skills needed to keep our signature within a 1 inch by 4 inch box. We returned the forms to the attorneys and waited (yet again).
It was now early December, over a month since our last communication with the attorneys and we were coming down to the final weeks on our temporary visas when we were told that our residency permit applications had been granted. There was just one last step: a medical examination, after which (assuming the government deemed us to be healthy enough) we would be able to pick up the permits. We were able to set up our appointments for the examinations through the attorneys, and our exams were scheduled for mid-December.
The attorneys also informed us that we had to pay several hundreds of euros in fees to the French government, and that the fees could only be paid using tax stamps. Tax stamps are available for sale at tabacs (tobacco/lottery ticket/tax stamp stores located all over Paris) but you cannot be guaranteed of finding all types of stamps or unlimited quantities of any particular stamp at any given tabac. I was able to pick up a few of the stamps that we needed at a store a block from our apartment, but then proceeded to wander through the city for an hour, visiting four other stores before I could buy all of the stamps we needed. And you have to pay for the stamps with cash, which led to an emergency ATM visit.
The night before our medical examinations we pulled together folders with all of our paperwork, our passports, and the tax stamps, and we nervously set the alarm for an hour of the morning that we haven’t seen since our first jet-lagged days in Paris.
The next morning we had just a short walk to our local branch of l’Office Francaise de l’Immigration et de l’Integration, but were alarmed to find a large group of people lined up outside the door. We went inside see if we needed to join that line, and encountered an employee guarding the door and a crowded waiting room. We showed the guard the letters confirming our appointments and were quickly directed past the first waiting room to a location upstairs. Upstairs we showed our letters to a pair of women behind a desk in a second (equally crowded) waiting room. We were promptly directed back to a third (even more crowded) waiting room, where we showed our letters to a third set of employees. A thick folder bearing our names materialized and we were directed to wait in this third waiting room.
There was nowhere to sit, so we awkwardly milled around and tried to stay out of the way. Then after a few minutes our names were called by an official-looking person and we were escorted back to the second waiting room. Feeling very confused, we sat down, still clutching our letters. A friendly American college student spending the year studying in Paris was seated next to me and we all chatted about the process and the confusion. After waiting for another five or ten minutes, we were called back to the third waiting room for a second time.
Back in the third waiting room, we were escorted almost immediately into a large medical examination room. Some highlights of the medical examination:
- We were weighed and had our height measured. I was wearing high heels that day; I wore a suit in an attempt to look respectable. When I showed the nurse that I was in heels, she told me that I should take off one shoe and measured my height while I awkwardly stood there, kind of tilted to one side with one high heel on. As a result, my height as recorded by the French government is 1.5 inches taller than my actual height.
- They also did a few vision tests. The first vision test was a pretty typical eye chart. The next test involved a laminated card with a series of paragraphs in French, each paragraph in a different size of type. I had to read the entire paragraph in the smallest type (though I only understood and definitely knew how to pronounce about half of the words). J (who is working every day instead of going to housewife French class) only got through about 3 awkwardly pronounced words before they asked him to stop.
- They took our chest x-rays to check for tuberculosis.
- We each had an private appointment with a doctor to discuss our x-rays and medical history. The doctor took my pulse and blood pressure, examined my chest x-ray, and pronounced my lungs “trés jolie.” She took an somewhat random medical history in a mix of English and French. She would first ask her questions in French and then translate if I did not understand the question. Some questions I could understand and answer in French. Others were a little more confusing:
Had I had any surgeries? No.
Any big surgeries? No. No surgeries at all.
But were there any big surgeries? No. No big surgeries.
- J went after me, and when we compared notes we realized that even though the same person took our medical histories, she did not ask us the same questions and she did not ask nearly as many questions of him. It seems as if my limited grasp of the French language made me easier to question, and the doctor didn’t want to suffer through too much of an examination with someone who did not speak French at all.
We waited for a few more minutes out in the third waiting room, then were given some papers and told to go to the door on the left. In this final room, we were able to hand over all the tax stamps, sign a few papers, and receive official-looking laminated cards that allow us to stay in France for the next year. We were able to leave with our permits in hand less than 2 hours after we arrived. Many of the people that we had seen in all three waiting rooms when we first arrived were still waiting when we left. We also saw a number of people working with the employees to fill out forms, schedule future appointments, or figure out what documentation they needed to prove that they were eligible to be living in Paris. We knew all throughout the process that we were very fortunate to have attorneys to help us navigate all of the paperwork and red tape, but we didn’t fully appreciate how much simpler the process of becoming legal (temporary) residents of France had been for us until we tried to walk out the door of the immigration office. The long line of people that had initially confused us when approaching the office that morning was still there, waiting outside in the cold. Meanwhile we were on our way home, residency permits in hand.
