Applied for Residence Permit for an Employed person

becstew91 · Post by **becstew91** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 6:03 am

Hello there,

I would appreciate any help or stories from experience regarding applying for a residence permit for an employed person. My boyfriend is currently in Canada with me, and he is a Finnish citizen. His father owns a company and has offered both of us jobs to start as soon as (or if) I get accepted. I attached my work contract to my application and visited the embassy on May 8, 2014. It has been roughly 75 days since I applied & paid and online my progress still shows to be in the 'initiated' phase. Is this normal? it seems like it should have moved farther across the board by now and I am eager to go to Finland as my boyfriend is leaving on August 1, and we were originally hoping that I could've gone with him.

Has anyone else who has applied for the same permit had a similar experience? Basically I'm wondering if it is normal that my app still shows to be in the 'initiated' phase after this amount of time?

Any help is appreciated!

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betelgeuse · Post by **betelgeuse** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 11:14 am

becstew91 wrote: I would appreciate any help or stories from experience regarding applying for a residence permit for an employed person. My boyfriend is currently in Canada with me, and he is a Finnish citizen. His father owns a company and has offered both of us jobs to start as soon as (or if) I get accepted. I attached my work contract to my application and visited the embassy on May 8, 2014. It has been roughly 75 days since I applied & paid and online my progress still shows to be in the 'initiated' phase. Is this normal? it seems like it should have moved farther across the board by now and I am eager to go to Finland as my boyfriend is leaving on August 1, and we were originally hoping that I could've gone with him.

http://www.migri.fi/services/processing ... employment

"The target processing time for issuing a decision on a resident permit application for employment is four months."

During summer migri has a ton of student applications to process. They get handled as "urgent" because they want to process them before the semester starts. Finnish bureaucracy works at its own speed and there is not much you can do to speed it up:

http://www.migri.fi/working_in_finland/ ... sing_times

"Processing can rarely be expedited"

What you can do (and are entitled by law) is to ask migri for an estimate on when your application is processed:

Hallintolaki 23§: http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2 ... 0434#L5P23

If you marry him, it entitles you to apply for the permit in Finland. If you have cohabited for more than two years, you could also do this. But since that resets the clock, you might want to get the estimate from migri first and maybe just wait.

becstew91 · Post by **becstew91** » Fri Jul 25, 2014 1:51 am

When I asked Migri for an estimate they gave me the same general 4 month answer. Has anyone else's app stayed in the 'initiated' phase of the progress bar for this length of time? (77 days) and if so, when it finally did progress was it in a more timely manner... Once it got passed initiated bar I mean? I am kind of hoping once they look at it, it will move across the bar more quickly rather than again waiting many many days between each phase.

For reference the stages are:
- initiated
-being procesed
- being decided on
- waiting for notification

Any help is appreciated.

GermanInHelsinki · Post by **GermanInHelsinki** » Fri Jul 25, 2014 1:36 pm

Your boyfriend of course told you that most people in Finland take the whole July as summer vacation.

Student applications of course have higher priority, and from May to August Migri is busy with them. Currently Migri has 560 pending student applications, and between application and decision there are usually 1-2 weeks.

When your application will be processed, the main part of processing is of course the evaluation of the employment office whether there might be unemployed people available who could do the job instead of you.

betelgeuse · Post by **betelgeuse** » Fri Jul 25, 2014 1:50 pm

becstew91 wrote:When I asked Migri for an estimate they gave me the same general 4 month answer. Has anyone else's app stayed in the 'initiated' phase of the progress bar for this length of time? (77 days) and if so, when it finally did progress was it in a more timely manner... Once it got passed initiated bar I mean? I am kind of hoping once they look at it, it will move across the bar more quickly rather than again waiting many many days between each phase.

The bulk of the waiting time is for someone to take a look at the application (generally first in, first out = fifo). Once it hits someone's desk it will be much faster between the steps.

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