Little waster wrote: ↑Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:31 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:44 pm
I'm not sure I've understood. Sounds like they have to enter Spain to collect their TIE cards, but can't enter Spain without their TIE cards?
These kinds of circular impossibilities are pretty common with immigration paperwork in my experience.
It is almost as if the Daily Mail and its readership have been demanding a Kafkaesque immigration policy for decades, one which the mean EU apparently prevents its members from ever implementing.
There has been a lot of back and forth on this, for many months. Get yer popcorn:
A load of Brits were very late to register at the back end of 2020. Some may have been incompetent/dithering, but a lot of people who had been planning to move to Spain in 2-3-4 years time will have advanced their plans in order to get in under the Withdrawal Agreement conditions, and of course Covid complicated everything. So while it looks like a case of "Well, they should have started sooner, serve 'em right", in practice it's not so simple. (And again, while enjoying the schadenfreude, please remember that the great majority of these people either voted Remain or had no vote; the occasional moron who voted Leave makes fun TV but is not typical.)
This influx rather overwhelmed the ability of the Spanish authorities to cope; they were having to learn new rules (the conditions for Brits under the WA are not quite the same as for continuity-EU citizens) and they also had to deal with Covid. And they also had requests from all the Brits who did not need a new residency card, and who could have waited until 2021 or 2022 or 2030 to apply for one, doing so anyway because "I don't trust Spain/UK/EU not to change the rules". Those of us who understand international law and the difference between the threatened 2019 No-Deal [of any kind] Brexit and the threatened No-[trade-]Deal Brexit knew that there was no urgency, but for the most part we are not dealing here with people who read legal treaties for entertainment, so this was perhaps also not unreasonable.
And sure enough, there was a cock-up and the first batch of new-style ("TIE") residency cards issued to Brits said "Family Member of an EU citizen" (this is a common type of TIE, but not what the Brits should have got) rather than "UK citizen with rights under the WA", so those had to go back, and people got even more worried, because they had handed in their old cards and only spotted the mistake a bit later. On top of that, there is the absolutely soul-crushing nature of any visit to any form of Spanish officialdom, which has to be experienced to be believed. The other day I had to deal with the tax and the municipality people in the same day and I was incapable of any sort of intellectual effort until the next morning. It is quite uniquely draining, and difficult to describe to anyone who has not been through it.
Anyway, by the end of 2020 there were lots of people who had applied for their residency card, but not received it. They will have had one of two types of receipt. Some had one acknowledging [only] that their application had been submitted (but not yet examined). Others had one saying that their application had been received and accepted (and they just needed to turn up and collect their card). In principle, either was sufficient to say "I have duly submitted my application for residency under the WA. In principle...
And then, Christmas happened. So lots of the Brits went back to the UK to get Covid with their families, and then three things happened in quick succession. First was the final act of Brexit, which meant that as of 2021-01-01 UK citizens can no longer enter the EU without a good reason, as has been the case for (e.g.,) Americans since last May; it also brought in the Schengen 90-in-180 thing, which is an additional complexity that doesn't help, although it isn't what's causing the current problem. Second, the UK's own lockdown said that you can't travel abroad for holidays, only for "a good reason", and of course the UK's list of good reasons isn't quite the same thing. Third, and most importantly, Spain (like some other countries) brought in a ban on flying or sailing directly from the UK to Spain unless you were a Spanish passport holder or "a resident" of Spain, because of B.1.1.7. This even affected non-resident EU citizens, who otherwise have been able to move around freely since the start of the pandemic.
Then the real fun and games started. Nobody at the UK end seemed to know how to identify a resident of Spain. At some airports people were allowed to board with an old-style residence permit but not the new-style one. At other airports, it was vice versa. The UK and Spanish authorities both put out advisories with pictures of all the acceptable documents, and after a week or so the jobsworths had managed to read them and things seemed to be getting back on track.
Except for the people who had only a receipt, either for "submitted" or "received and accepted". This was in a multitude of formats and unless you have fluent Spanish, and are prepared to trust the format and logo, it's hard to tell what it means exactly, or even if it's genuine. So they had trouble getting on the plane, even though in principle they were allowed to.
Then on 4 January, Spain announced that people with only a receipt would not be allowed to fly in after 11 January. Not everyone concerned got this message, or maybe some did and they couldn't get a flight. So they were now stuck in the UK.
On about 2 March, Spain reversed this and announced that people with a receipt now could fly to Spain. But the UK airports didn't all get the memo and were still turning some people down, and some of the people concerned didn't hear about it either.
As of yesterday (30 March), Spain has removed the ban on direct flight/ship trips from the UK, because the B.1.1.7 variant is everywhere anyway. So now is the first time since Christmas that people have been able to go to a UK airport and be confident that they will be allowed into Spain to continue their residency application. Except that it appears that either the authorities at Alicante didn't get the memo, or there's something else about some of them that we aren't being told. (A feature of the recent reporting on this whole question of UK residents has been a few terrible people hiding behind "evil Spanish bureaucrats" in their interviews with sympathetic UK tabloids to cover various deficiencies in their own cases.)
Of course, it's all being hugely over-dramatized, with the Brits objecting to the fact that they could see security people with machine guns, like there isn't exactly the same thing at any UK airport ("but that's different, they're protecting us from the nasty moooslim terrorists, the Spanish are just trying to intimidate us by reminding us of Franco"
). But it is also absolutely not inconceivable that a f.ck-up along the lines of what the Mail is reporting could in fact have happened.