Students to get residence permits quicker
03 Oct 2007
It will soon be made easier for international students to get a residence permit for study in the Netherlands. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) has developed a new procedure for student applicants. This follows a successful trial with students in Utrecht in September 2006. During the trial, higher education institutions were allowed to apply direct to the IND for the residence permits, rather than having to first take all the documentation to the local authority offices.
The trial went so well that the IND now wants to introduce the procedure nationwide. The trial in Utrecht came about following a similar experiment a year earlier. That involved IND officials working at local authority offices to handle permit applications on-site. “The latest procedure has proved to work better,” says Martin Bruinsma of the IND. “By removing the local authority from the procedure and by centralizing the applications, we save a lot of time. We can now issue residence permits in about half the time it would normally take.”
In the past, applications could take anything from three to eight months, but now students can get their residence permits in as little as six weeks. The IND does not yet now when the trial will become standard procedure. (Source: Transfer/www.nuffic.nl)