My Immigration appointment

The paperwork saga involved with Immigration to Panama -- even though it's only temporary immigration, as I'll be here only nine months -- is a big process.  All Fulbright scholars get a copy of an incredibly detailed, and yet still somehow incredibly confusing, list of paperwork we need to pull together both before and after arriving at Panama.  I described the U.S. paperwork portions in this blog post; and the pre-Immigration-Office stuff in this blog post.  And on Monday, the 25th I had my actual immigration appointment.  I was accompanied by a woman from the Embassy, who I'll call "Beatrice" (not her actual name).  Last week, Beatrice sent me this email: 

This email is to let you know that your registration appointment has been scheduled for Monday, November 25, 2024, at 9:00 a.m.

The location is National Immigration Service building (Via Ricardo J. Alfaro),  2nd floor Special, Trámites Especiales Section.

We are going to meet at least 10 minutes before in the main entrance of the building.

Remember to bring with you all documents from the checklist with its translations and medical certificates.

 

Consider following business casual dress code.

That last sentence --- about clothing -- is actually a biggie.  I'd heard stories from quite a few other Fulbright grantees about getting kicked out of the NIS building because of clothing (particularly, for clothing showing shoulders), and having to buy other clothes before coming in.  Panamanians cover much more of their body than Pennsylvanians do in the same weather: you walk around the mall here on 85-plus-degree days, and everyone is in jeans; no shorts or capris in sight. I went to an event where the dress code was described as "traje de calle" (which translates literally as "street clothes"), only to see everyone else in blazers and tailor-cut outfits. (It turns out "traje de calle" corresponds much more closely to our "business attire").  I don't own a blazer, so I was crossing fingers that my fancy t-shirt with long sleeves will suffice.  I know I'm not supposed to wear sleeveless shirts, and no open-toed shoes, either.

Another thing about that email:  Did you notice how the location for our meeting comes with a building name and a street name, but no street number?  That's because there are barely any buildings with numbers on them here in Panama.  That link takes me to a map, but it turns out, the link is to the wrong place along the street, which gives you a bit of a hint as to how my adventures began.  So, if you love Sagas of Bureaucracy, the following saga is designed to delight.  Read on.

Monday, November 25

• 8:12 a.m. My Uber shows up, three minutes before the time I scheduled. I love being on time or a little bit ahead; I figure this bodes well for the day.
  
  
• 830: the Uber drops me off at the Ministry of External Relations (Authentication and Legalization). Along the way, my driver had asked me if I didn't want to go to the immigration office? I knew that I had an immigration appointment, but also, this is the place that the link had told me to go to, so I got out. Also, doesn't "external relations" sound a little bit like what a Fulbright Scholar should be dealing with?
  
• I had imagined being in a large building with mysterious dark corners, office after office, benches in hallways, with lots of people waiting. Instead, this was one large white room that otherwise might have been a clothing store; after all, it was in a strip mall.  The room had five windows with tellers at one end, and a line of only seven people waiting for the next available agent. On the left wall was a big Panamanian flag near two large desks, with seats for people to use during appointments, and a sign above the desks saying "Verification". On the right, there was a banner proclaiming "ministry of exterior relations" and seven folding chairs where people could wait, mostly unused.
  
  
  
  
  
• 8:50 AM, which is when Beatrice had told me she would arrive. Shortly after this, I got a text from her asking where I was. It turns out, the Uber driver was right. Rather than try to figure out where I was, and also how to get to wherever Beatrice was, I handed the phone over to a reluctant guard.  He spent quite a while talking with her back-and-forth, at which point he handed me back the phone; she suggested I get an Uber, saying he'd told her I was not actually very far away.
  
  
• 9:20 AM: the new Uber manages to find me, with only a little bit of us both getting lost.
  
  
• 9:25 AM: I arrive at what is clearly the immigration building. The first floor is a giant space full--but full--of people waiting. Beatrice finds me and we leave the crowded space to go up to the second floor.

  

  "Servicio Nacional de Migración":
  the correct building to be in.

  
  
  
• 9:30 AM, we enter a small, highly decorated room. I'd wanted to take a picture of this room, but the guards up there said I shouldn't. It's mostly me, Beatrice, and a woman wearing an official-looking shirt with an official-looking patch, sitting at a desk. Beatrice and I sit at two comfortable chairs with a table in front of us, and she asks me for my documents. Beatrice gives me my Fulbright ID card, and then she goes through the checklist that we Fulbrighters had gotten, asking for things one by one. I am very glad that I have them arranged in order, with sticky notes to make it easier to identify them, and I'm very glad to hand them to her one by one.  Beatrice passes them along to the Woman at the Desk.
  
  

  

  My paperwork, with the helpful
  sticky notes returned to me.

  
  
• 9:50 AM: Beatrice and the Woman at the Desk have a back-and-forth about photocopies of my passport. There's one page in particular that contains my entry stamp. This is the one page I photocopied after I got to Panama, and the confusion is whether I actually did photocopy it (Maybe it's not in the packet? or Maybe they need two photocopies of that, because that one stamp is so important? I'm not really sure.) Beatrice says we can go down to the basement and make a photocopy, but the woman at the desk does this for us on the QT. That's very nice of her. 
  
  I also offer up a silent and heartfelt thanks that Beatrice is there to work out all these details, and that I don't have to try to beg people to speak more slowly and to guess what they're actually saying.  
  
  
• 10:27 a.m. There's one form that we filled out before coming to Panama that we're not supposed to sign until we actually show up at the immigration office.  (This is the "Declaración Jurada de Antecedentes Personales").  At this point, I sign it and also add my right thumbprint to the upper right corner.  (Later, I'll find that I checked one box incorrectly, but Beatrice helps me to fix that).
  
  
• 10:30 a.m. I get back my passport and a voucher (both of which I'll need again that day), and Beatrice leads me back to the elevators. All the buttons on one elevator say "up", and all the buttons to call the other elevator say "down".  We get in an elevator, go up, then down to the main floor, exit the building, re-enter the building through an adjacent set of doors (apparently, you're not supposed to enter the main floor directly from the elevators??), head through the crowded main floor and take some stairs down to the basement.
  
  The basement is very DMV-like, with lots of people sitting in chairs waiting and mysterious tellers at various desks around the outside.  Beatrice takes me straight to one of these tellers; I hand him my voucher, my passport, and $5.  He gives me two payment receipts (a white one for me and a yellow one that I will need to give the Woman at the Desk later).  He adds a stamp to my passport.  We then take the passport to another teller, who photocopies the new stamp for us (25 cents).   Then we head back upstairs and outside.
  
  
• 10:42 a.m.  A driver from the Embassy picks us up in a large black SUV to take us to the notary, where I'll get the photocopies of my passport notarized.   The notary is in another strip-mall (in the "Plaza de Los Angeles"), not very far distance-wise, but the traffic is fairly horrendous. 
  
  
  
  
  
• 10:50 a.m.  We arrive at at the notary. Beatrice takes a number (122) and our ticket says that we can expect to be served at 11:40. The sign on the wall says they're currently serving ticket number 110. Beatrice says that even though the ticket says 11:40, "this usually goes fast, only 20 or 30 minutes". The waiting room is full, with 30 people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in four rows of chairs, with two different teller windows at the front and a door to the side of them leading back to where the notaries themselves are working.
  
  
• 11:12 a.m.: Our number is called. We take my passport photocopies to the window and give them $20. Beatrice tells them what we need. They take the copies into their back room while we go and sit in the chairs again.
  
  
• 11:30 a.m.: They call my name. I get my notarized paper as they bring it from the back room. Beatrice calls the embassy driver to come pick us up. More Panama traffic.
  
  
• 11:47 a.m.: we're back at the immigration office. We take the elevator back up to the second floor, and again we meet the Woman at the Desk. We hand her my passport copies, my actual passporrt, plus all the other paperwork, plus the yellow receipt that I had gotten in the basement of the same building.
  
  
• 11:50 a.m.: Beatrice and I sit and wait.
  
  
• 12:05 p.m.: The Woman at the Desk goes through my submitted materials, page by page, checking (for example) my actual passport versus the notarized photocopies.
  
  
• 12:20 p.m.:  The Woman at the Desk notices the number on the translation of my FBI background clearance and apostilles did not match the actual number on my apostille.  She tells us we're going to have to redo the translation. The apostille and background checks had been a huge cause of confusion for me, so I actually had two of each. Moreover, the translator had initially made a mistake the first time he translated my documents, and so he gave me a second set. Fortunately, somewhere in my collective papers – not the papers I had originally given to Beatrice, but among the others that I had kept as back up – I had a complete matched set. It took a while to get this sorted out, but the Woman at the Desk finally accepted it all.
  
  
• As I mentioned above, on one form that I filled out, I had checked on page 8 "Lo Afirmo– I agree". Beatrice had brought a back-up copy, and handed me a blank page. She had me change the checkbox to "Lo Niego – I disagree". I signed and dated this page.
  
  
• 12:25 p.m. I start to hear the sound of the stapler, which I love: it means the Woman at the Desk has accepted yet another batch of my paperwork.
  
  
• 12:27 p.m.  The Woman at the Desk actually signs something. Yay!  Her assistant hands her a stamp, and she alternates between writing stuff on paper and looking at the computer. 
  
  
• 12:32 p.m. The Woman at the Desk uses the stamp!  She gives the papers she'd signed to Beatrice, and we leave.

Next steps

Getting my immigration paperwork processed will still take a bunch of time: Beatrice estimates it'll take three weeks for the officials here to grind this out.  In four or five weeks, I'm hoping to go to the big Math Meetings in Seattle, which Beatrice knows.  (She also estimated today's paperwork would take two hours, and we'd be done by 11:00 a.m., so I'm going to take her estimates with a huge grain of salt).

If I leave Panama while my paperwork is still in process, that's bad: I'll incur a $500 fine or worse.  So I'm really, really hoping that all of this goes through smoothly.