Spain to Speed Up Residence and Work Permit Processing – New Plan Launched

Spain to Speed Up Residence and Work Permit Processing – New Plan Launched

The authorities of Spain have announced that they have set up a new scheme to enhance the procedure for work and residence permits.

To speed up the process, the Spanish Ministry of Territorial Policy has added more strength to the offices of Foreigners Affairs alongside the allocation of 300 civil servants.

 

According to SchengenVisaInfo.com reports, these workers are accountable to provide people from other nations with legal authority to work and live in Spain.

 

The purpose of this is to sort out the 20,000 pending cases and decrease the processing time of work and residence visas as The European Union Commission explains.

 

“This procedure will bring two benefits. The first is to solve the 20,000 pending cases and the second is to reduce the processing times. This idea is similar to the government’s latest reform in the form of new immigration law. It is expected to increase the number of applications as well,” the Commission stated.

 

Last year, Spanish visa officers received over 866,790 requests for residence and work permits. And this number is continuously increasing and making new records every year since 2012. In addition, these requests jumped 2857 per cent in 2021 as compared to 2020.

 

The availability of electronic applications and the Ukraine war were the major reasons for the continuous rise in the number of applications for these permits.

                                                                        

Though the commission has appointed new staff, they are still falling behind in terms of managing things. The result is that applicants had to wait for long and authorities have to break their rules.

 

The law describes that any application needs 90 days to be resolved but the immigration team is taking roughly 180 days for it. On this, the Commission mentioned that there’s a regular mention of the malfunctioning in the Ombudsman’s annual reports.

 

The addition of extra employees for authentication of the applications started in September and it will continue for nine months.

 

Besides, the Government of Spain also enforced the immigration law to add migrant employees to the labour market. This law enables all those living in Spain for at least two years to work in fields facing shortages if they are trained or skilled for regularizing their situation.