Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy.
It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.
It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.
By the way, I've lived in a few European countries and researched many others. The Netherlands was by far the easiest/most efficient in terms of bureaucracy.
If only. Instead you run in to catch-22s and simply get a shrug and "it's not possible".
The big downside of being the "easiest/most efficient" is that it deals with exceptions poorly; once you fall outside of the "efficient" workflow you're screwed. Lots of people run in to problems with this and people literally become homeless because of this. Ironically, it's easier if you're actually homeless and sleeping on the street – as opposed to being homeless and having enough money to stay at hotels or are temporarily staying with friends – as there are some special exceptions for people registered at the salvation army and such.
Anybody with > 100K euros in income from consultancy (which should be most of them!) living in NL should consider doing the same thing. There is some overhead but that's easily farmed out to an administrator.
As far as I can compare with some immigrant friends in the Netherlands I feel Swedish bureaucracy is on the same level or even less burdensome than the Dutch one.
Of course, he also complains heavily about the bureaucracy here, which is equally broken but in a different way.
- over the years
- step by step
- with the help of their parents
Then they arrive in a new country and realize what it's like to administratively become a functional resident. You probably got your first bank account in your teenage, your national IDs as a newborn, etc. Then you move elsewhere and you need to create all these things from scratch and discover them also.
First, most "digital nomads" who interact with the public administration and institutions (e.g., banks) are not standard customers. Employees often have no clue how to deal with them and many processes contain manual steps that require someone's validation or approval, and often target a very small group of individuals (those tasked with "dealing with" foreigners). It can slow down things.
Second, Portugal is particularly well known for having great ideas and conferences about digital transformation but completely lacks the ability to deliver within its own ranks. To its defense, most citizens cannot easily purchase services online, either because lack of money, or because lack of computer literacy/equipment, or because they don't even have an online payment mechanism. These factors greatly limit incentives for a rapid digital transformation, which incidentally, is precisely what digital nomads crave for.
The comparison with Switzerland was made earlier, it matches my argument: 1) widespread computer literacy and modern endpoint equipment 2) widespread access to online payment solutions 3) the population is used to pay-as-you-go public service (vs. all-inclusive taxpayer service expected by citizens in most EU countries). These combined greatly encourage the deployment of efficient online interfaces.
I have recent experience with Korea which is overall quite efficient in fact, and yet it's still a struggle to figure out what I need to do, how to do it, and language barriers don't help.
Honestly I would be shocked if you could point me anywhere else in the world where a Korean could be illegally staying, go to the motor bureau and not only get a free translator but get an official state ID and driver license.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/customer-service/interpreter-s...
That’s only about the government though, private companies are hilariously terrible at customer service or paperwork especially compared to US/Canada.
But I guess this is an EU thing compared to what I’m used to in Canada and the US.
It’s also very common for administrations to have no one answering the phone/email. And most administrations are appointments only. So often, you kind of have to drive to different places, maybe different city halls, and hope that someone has a contact with an internal e-mail address and can hook you up. That’s just how it works. It’s the most barbaric administration and closest to a third world country I’ve experienced, and I’m French, so I know something about red tape.
I don't know Sweden. But we're a family of expats with multiple citizenships, so I deal with bureaucracy in 4 countries on 3 continents. Most countries have streamlined procedures, provide tracking numbers, addresses to send things in, phone lines... So it's long, but you know what's going on and what to do.
Here, even lawyers don't even know what to do. For a similar situation to get my partner a visa from within the country, we simply couldn't speak to anyone. Even the lawyer told us "well, you might have to wait a year or two to see if they re-open their ability to take new appointments." We eventually were able to get through after hustling like crazy, me driving to many different city halls to speak to officials there. Someone eventually knew a colleague there, and got us an appointment for 6 months later in a city 3 hours drive away. We showed up, it was a butcher. Their Google Maps pin was not even in the right place. Cherry on the cake. After getting turn-by-turn instructions from the butcher (who apparently does that 10 times a day), we eventually found their office.
Idk, never been to Sweden but I don't think you can compete with that :-D
Now I get it, they're vastly understaffed, Portugal is a small country. They're doing what they can.
My family moved to Portugal in late 2020. Covid played havoc as they had to find ways to digitalize many things their offices were doing. It took my wife 9 months to get her DL exchanged and me 11 months.
During that time, you are not driving illegally; you are driving from your foreign license. As long as you have the paper with the exchange info and a picture, you will be fine.
It also helps if you hire a relocation expert who knows the system. We paid ~$1,500 to a Portuguese American lady who helped us with everything. She handled setting up all our health care, apartment negotiation and contract review, set up all our utilities and phones, all our residency paperwork, DL exchange, bank account, and more. I highly recommend her and any group like her. They know how to work the system. My mom does similar back in the USA for newly arrived expats for companies.
Covid was a real shock to office-heavy organizations; it has been a mad scramble to change culture, paperwork, operations, etc. I think they are doing decent and hopefully, in 5 years, it is night-and-day difference.
I've lived in Egypt as well... the bureaucracy there worked really well (before revolution). I just had to go to a giant building and spend half a day there, done. Sure I had to taxi to a DSL place to pay, but that was pretty easy as well.
In the third world, that's called a tout, and they're a symbol of corruption and inefficiency. The only thing missing seems to be bribes paid to move your papers from one desk to the other faster.
What they are called now is a "relocation expert", and they help set everything up for you. They are in no way a symbol of corruption or inefficiency, but rather a professional who knows the system. IE, to get a DL you go this office, you fill out this form, you fax it to x, etc.
Do I wish everything was 100% online and designed with high UX standards? Sure, I also would love if it rained M&Ms on Fridays at 4.11pm :). Both of these things are not going to happen.
Here is an example: Malaysia and Indonesia. Each country has its own bureaucratic nightmares but you can make useful comparisons.
Malaysia: Easy to get a phone number. Easy to get an internet hotspot to get data. Reliable internet. Internet is fully open (no censorship).
Indonesia: Hard to get a phone number. Confusing choices and prices with Whatsapp/FB mingled in the choices. Have to submit your passport photo to some dodgy dude, who has to get a certain authorization. Took half a day for the Internet to activate. Data is not very reliable. Heavy censorship (not even Reddit works!) so have to get a VPN to do any meaningful browsing.
So sure as an expat you'll face bureaucracy but some countries' issue is beyond bureaucracy, it's that the process is fundamentally broken and no one gives a shit. This makes you lose significant time for relatively simple things (at least in other countries).
This depends on your ISP I believe; Telkom blocks Reddit, but I believe others do allow it. You don't need a VPN to bypass it, DNS-over-HTTPS will do as well.
In general things in Indonesia seem to be ... complicated. Just buying something at the local Indomaret sometimes seemed to involve typing an entire essay on a computer.
For example we wanted to get internet in the apartment we were renting. The local ISP (Orange) said that we needed a Spanish bank account, we said that we had a European account so could make an IBAN transfer, but apparently that wasn't an option. So we went to the bank and they said my wife needed a letter from the police. So we went there, and after showing all her university documents and waiting there for half a day, she got that. By that time the bank was closed, so we went back the next day, and after another few hours she had a bank account. We made a transfer of a few hundred euros from our other European account at home, then once it arrived a few days later, went back to the ISP. They took our details and the first payment, and then we figured everything was fine.
A month later the first bill came and we tried to pay but it was declined, tried to log into online banking and that was blocked too. We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do. So we went to visit the ISP with the intention of paying in store, but they said it wasn't an option. We explained the situation and said there was nothing they could do, we could only pay with a Spanish bank account. In the end we had to get a friend to make the ISP payment for us, every month while we were living there.
Compare this to where we live now. You simply make payments to an IBAN bank account, so it can come from anywhere in Europe. If you need a local bank account, you can easily do so in any bank (I opened an account before I was officially living there, i.e. without any local ID, just my passport) or use something like Revolut. If you need to get a local phone number, you just go to the supermarket and buy a prepaid SIM for €1 - no ID needed.
> We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do.
That's an absolute nightmare (though I don't understand how you weren't notified, or what the recourse typically is for accounts closed due to "suspicious activity".
The rest can be summarized as:
* A business wants billing from a local bank account (not universal, but not unusual)
* Opening a local bank account needs some information confirming your identity, which the police can do.
* Getting these forms isn't instant
* Banks don't have long opening hours
In the UK, I visited a nearby Lloyd's branch and got my account open and my stuff in under an hour.
In India and Switzerland, the bank sent a representative to my place, where they did everything from a handheld device, including verification. Done in an hour and got my card by mail in 1-2 days.
The stuff you mentioned in your summary are excuses and not valid ones at all.
ps: when i wanted a bank account, the people there acted like they didn't spoke english, until it was clear they won't give me an account, then suddenly english was not a problem.
I'm not seeing your issue here. This has been well-known for a century, so don't show up during the siesta time.
"I want to live in a foreign country, but they need to change to be like my home country!"
Thinking about it now, it seems a little bigger than I realised when I wrote it.
I too moved to another country and got a bank account. When the people at the bank asked what I needed, I said something like "well, I'm here to stay and will need all the things regular people have, an account, a card, probably a house loan someday, can you advise me about what I should get today?". Maybe I hadn't yet decided that I wanted to stay for decades when I said that, but the person behind approved of the answer, I could tell.
Saying something vaguely like "I'll do the minimum necessary here and whatever possible in my old country" simply isn't a great way to talk to the people at the bank, at the immigration authority, at the waterworks, all the people who can make your move simple or less so.
For reference, I found the UK pretty sensible, Spain frustrating, and my native south american country a nightmare.
I think that due to the high cost of labour (highest minimal pay in the world) and lack of labour due to higher speed of development - whatever that can be automated has been automated.
Counterpoint, in France the vast majority of bureacratic things can be done fully online. Last time i had to go in person was for a passport/ID card, so there are multiple good reasons (photo, biometric info, confirm your identity) for that. Some of the websites are not great, and sometimes they send you a confirmations by mail, but otherwise a pretty painless experience.
You emigrate (verb) out of a country. That makes you an emigrant (noun) of your old country.
You expatriate (verb) to a country, from your homeland. You are an expatriate (noun) (aka expat) if you live in a country other than your native one.
For example, an American-born man who moved to Germany for part of their career and is living in Vietnam for retirement would be an American expat, who immigrated to Vietnam and emigrated from Germany.
You are often all 3 of them at once, depending on perspective. Colloquially, expats usually emigrate out of their homeland for specific reasons, usually either climate, culture, taxes. Eg. someone would expatriate to Portugal to take advantage of the tax scheme (this article), or maybe expatriate to Mexico for 'better' weather, or maybe expatriates to Paris for the cultural experience.
It is often assumed or implied that an expat has no intention of "integrating" in the culture of their host nation. Eg. an American in Mexico that moved for the weather wouldn't raise children there or apply for citizenship, but simply enjoy retiring on the beach and taking advantage of the cheaper CoL. They may still primarily speak English and seek out fellow Americans-in-mexico to socialize with instead of the locals. Conversely, a full Mexican family (parents+kids) that moved to America "for a better life" may not be considered an expat, since they intend to become citizens of America and raise their family as Americans. That is why expats sometimes have a poor reputation in their host nation, compared to other "immigrants".
Someone moving from a poor country to a wealthier one is an immigrant if they intend to stay for life, and a migrant if they don't.
That's why you have American expats living in Thailand and Mexico, but Thai immigrants and Mexican migrants living in America.
- White people with the burden (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden )
- White people without the burden
- People of colour
When a person in the first category moves to another country, they are an expat; people from the other 2 categories are immigrants or migrants, as they prefer to say nowadays.
For instance I’d have to take a significant pay cut if I wanted to be the British prime minister but, belonging to the second category, I am an economic migrant. An American or Swedish teenager working in a Starbucks in Berlin is an expat.
expat is a person moving to another country and getting paid a high salary.