What would happen to my immigration application in this national emergency?

Laura Caballero Gutiérrez,  Immigration lawyer. AGM Abogados.

Over the past few days, all ministries have designated appropriate measures to deal with the public health crisis caused by COVID-19. For the current situation, the Directorate-General for Immigration has established guidelines that will be implemented while the alert status is in effect.

The Ministry of Social Security and Immigration is taking a series of measures to balance public resources that currently available to the executive branch on one hand, on the other hand to safeguard the rights of all foreigners. Through these measures, the aim is to avoid any impact on the immigration process in progress or the administration process that will be carried out in the next few days, or to infringe on the rights of immigrant groups.

The measures included in the formal statement are as follows:

1. The first time (regular) work permit application submitted online before March 15th, the applicant after get approved can start work activities.
2. Initial entrepreneurial immigration applications which get approved through the administrative default approval period (silencio positive) under the Entrepreneur Law must wait for the competent authority to issue a formal approval letter for their application before they can start work.
3. Applications submitted online before March 15th, without receiving any supplementary documents requirement, if the website status is rejected, the appeal deadline will stop counting from the beginning of the state of alarm and continue after the end of the emergency state.
4. In a state of alarm, if the documents for the application expire, it is allowed to submit the expired documents when you submit again after the state of emergency.
5. In the case of a tourist or short-term student visa, the holder who are not being able to leave the country due to the national emergency state and the border closure, the applicant should submit a visa extension application, the visa will be extended based on the state border closure situation if the motivation is justified.
6. Applications submitted after March 15 will continue to be processed in accordance with regulations and will not be affected by the state of emergency for the moment. The administration will still carrying on the review and issue supplementary documents notices. However, if for some certain reason it is not possible to submit the required documents, the period of supplementary documents may be extended to the end of the emergency. However, if documents can be provided electronically, they should be submitted within the deadline. The following approval process will also proceed as scheduled.

Although the immigration application is basically in progress, in some cases, especially for applications that require the applicant to submit or go thought interview in person, the administration may suspend the process. In addition, there will be a large number of applications after the state of alarm is over, so the processing of these applications may experience a large delay.

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