SamShine said:
This is indeed a good news :) Thanks. "The practice shows that the IND applies the same method for permanent residence permits on the basis of national law". If I understand correctly, if a KM (who was student in the last 4 years and KM for just 1 year) had a gap in residency, he/she would still be eligible for permanent resident permit on the basis of national law. Am I correct?
No. Read carefully. It has to be a certain kind of gap. I will give a simple example:
You had a student residence permit that was valid until 1 September 2012. Then you found a job with an employer who could sponsor you as a kennismigrant. But your employer did not put in the paperwork for you to get a residence permit as a kennismigrant until 3 September 2012. That is still a fatal gap. In other words, if you let your residence permit completely lapse and do not do anything before that time to get a new residence permit, you lose all the time you had saved up until then.
Now I will give an example where the court ruling referred to above does fill a gap for you. You had a student residence permit that was valid until 1 September 2012. On 27 August 2012, your new employer had put in the paperwork for you to get a residence permit as a kennismigrant. But this application was incomplete-- the application was missing something vital that the IND needed to approve the application, like, say, the contract signed by you and your employer or the proof that your employer had always withheld its payroll taxes on time. On 15 September 2012, the IND writes a letter to your employer giving it the opportunity to complete the application with those documents. On 17 September 2012, your employer sends the missing documents to the IND. The IND approves the application for a residence permit as a kennismigrant for you, but only as of 17 September 2012, the day that your employer completed the application. Prior to the court judgment referred to above, this would have meant that you had a gap and had lost all of the years from your student time. But now, you do not get a gap, because you were actually "in process" during the time in between residence permits. Thus the clock (counting toward your five years) stopped for 16 days, but is not reset.
So it's very important to understand this-- you are only protected from getting a gap if you or somebody else started up a procedure with the IND prior to the expiration of your residence permit. If you just let your residence permit lapse (or even if you were trusting your employer to start up a procedure for you, but they failed to do so on time), then you still get a fatal gap.
Jeremy Bierbach, LLM
www.immigrate.nl
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