Comment by vbezhenar
3 days ago
Few of my relatives just went to Europe as tourists, threw away their back home tickets and went illegal. After few years they legalised and now citizens. And I'm still here, because I don't want to break the law and I don't have valid legal grounds to get the working visa. It sucks to obey the law.
This is such a common thing and tolerated you have to wonder whether it's actually immoral. I've met many people on my travels who went to Europe on tourist visas, got work and then got to stay legally later. No one was deported.
All of these were people in low-paying services industries, jobs Europeans don't usually want (waiters, cleaners, etc).
The only ones that had issues with immigration were my qualified worker friends who got a work visa and then the company had layoffs while they were there, losing their sponsorship. People with masters degrees who had to scramble to find new work in 30 days or face deportation.
It's hard not to think that's intentional.
I have a nuanced opinion because it's a rather complex subject but it's just a weird thing to have seen happen. As a tourist I had to prove up and down I wasn't going to stay there only to see no one else cares outside the airports. There's obvious wage suppression going on with these policies but these waiters and cleaners also had college degrees from good institutions, probably more qualified than some citizens.
> I've met many people on my travels who went to Europe on tourist visas, got work and then got to stay legally later.
That's completely legal for some nationalities, at least in Germany. §41 AufenthV allows people from certain countries to come to Germany and apply for a visa there.
A separate paragraph allows people to convert a tourist visa to a residence permit if the reason for the residence permit appeared while they were visiting. For example, going through rounds of interviews, and being offered the job while you're visiting Germany as a tourist.
There are so many other paths, but navigating those options can be confusing.
The problem is, that only works if your Aufenthaltsbehörde isn't swamped in case load. Unfortunately, the ones in cities where tech workers are wanted are swamped and often times you need a lawyer to file an Untätigkeitsklage (inactivity lawsuit) or threaten to do so to get them to respond.
The Ausländerbehörden are massively understaffed (well below 50% of what would be needed), and work distribution usually is that anything attached with a court deadline has absolute priority, anything from a lawyer comes next, and whatever comes from a generic person or company just gets shifted to "Ablage P" (the paper recycling bin).
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Borders of countries are fundamentally human constructs. There is no morality associated with crossing them legally or illegally. This is the difference between a law declaring something illegal because they think it is better for society (a parking ticket, say) and a law created that require moral turpitude (murder, say).
Morality is a human construct as well, so I don’t quite get your point.
Ha ha, “no morality,” when it’s people you like. You’re saying pogroms aren’t immoral? That’s a “legal” border crossing!
A country with no borders is not a country at all, merely an "economic zone" that can be leached until dry.
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What do you mean by valid legal grounds? For many countries all you need is to get a local job paying above a threshold, that’s enough to get a work permit.
You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around. If you meant a "job offer", yes you can get a work permit with a job offer, but not everybody is that lucky.
If you are on a tourist visa you can't legally get a job then worm your way to a valid work/residency visa. I mean you can, just not legally.
It varies per country, for example in the Netherlands as a software engineer and other "highly skilled" [1] roles you can get an HSM visa / work permit. I believe Germany, Denmark and others have similar programs.
This is how it works: you interview[2], get a job offer, sign it, then your employer applies for a work permit on your behalf. The only complicated part is collecting your own paperwork. You wait a few weeks/months for approval and move in. It's a lot easier than most people think. The permit is tied to your employment, though it can be transferred, but you cannot get a 'free employment' permit until after five years in the country.
For the EU as a whole, the Blue Card serves a similar purpose but is significantly more difficult to obtain.
[1] There is no skill/merit assessment like the USA, it's solely based on the salary threshold - basically delegates the skill assessment to the employer. Not every company has access to this program, the job must be advertised as including visa sponsorship.
[2] online. Flying over for a final round was common before COVID, I miss those days
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> You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around
To legally get a job yes, but that tends to not be super effective at stopping people, and even if the job itself is illegal, it can count as something that links you to the society where you want to regularize your situation.
Heavy "it depends on the country" since we're talking Europe-wide here.
>You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around
Technically yes, but actually no, because you mostly need an employer to sponsor your work permit, unless you get yourself a residence permit that is not job-related.
What might be some of the ways GP poster's family managed it?
Pretty much nobody does that in the USA (maybe by getting married? Prob not even that in Trump II), where I am. Come in an a tourist visa, stay over, manage to legalize your stay in a few years and then become a citizen. Nope.
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Now I'm curious what countries we're talking about and what's the process of "legalisation"
My relatives naturalised in the Spain.
How does this happen? Is there a law which just gives you a citizenship if you stayed for N years?
The exact country isn't clear, it depends from country to country. Spain for example have "arraigo social", where I think if you've stayed for 3 years (illegally/legally) and can demonstrate you've ended up in some sort of "link" with Spanish society (like having a permanent job) you can apply for a "temporary residence and work permit". Once you have that, you're legal and you could apply for permanent residence and eventually citizenship, granted you fulfill those requirements.
I have a bunch of friends, with jobs ranging from bartenders to software developers, who've successfully were allowed to stay in the country after doing things that way, initially staying illegally and later regularized their situation.