Long time ago, a distant relative of Joel's insinuated I was dating Joel to get an American Green Card i.e. US residency. I was in the US on a work visa with no plans to stay in the country long term till Joel convinced me otherwise... Ironically it ends up that Joel is the one that got his (Finnish equivalent of a) Green Card thanks to being married to me.
In the fall it was just the kids and I who stayed in Finland (see post on the details) while Joel dealt with our house back in California. When he joined us in October he came into the country as a tourist. The tourist visa allows you to stay up to 90 days. We immediately applied for a residency permit for him so he could stay longer. The process was made much easier by the fact that I had already registered our marriage in the Finnish population registry years ago when we got married.
The population registry, maintained by DVV( Digital Information and Population information Office), is a concept that doesn't exist in the US. I've always found it bizarre that to figure out how many people live in the country, US has had to canvas its residents door to door in a census carried out every 10 years. As of late it is done electronically and I wonder how many people actually bother providing the survey info. Seems like a costly, inefficient and incomplete exercise. Finland has no need to do a census: every person living in the country is registered in this system. When you move you provide a change of address form to the post office which then passes the info onto the population registry. When kids are born they are added to the registry as well. When you get married or die the information is updated in the registry. Hence the Government knows who you are, where you live, and exactly how many citizens and residents there are. Such a system might sound odd or even creepy to an American but I think it's great; it makes dealing with any buraucratic process a piece of cake.
Having the information in one place allows for electronic transfer of information between agencies and dealing with government agencies or anything you might otherwise need official proof of address is quick and easy. For example, when you want to enroll in the local school you don't need to show up with utility bills to prove you live in the area. When you sign up for kids sports, you don't need to dig up birth certificates to prove their age. This same population registry had already served us well in travelling to Finland both in the summer and the 2nd time Joel came back since only citizens and their immediate family were allowed in during Covid: An official version of the population registry print-out was Joel's way of proving his Finnish connection i.e. that he had a Finnish wife.
Before even applying for Joel's residence card we went to visit the DVV to update his address to be our Finnish address. I figured that would expedite him getting on health insurance or getting a bank card since for both of those you needed an official address in the system. The only hard part about this was getting an appointment (which was booked online as most of the processes now are) since all the agencies were backlogged thanks to Covid disruptions.
So, then to apply for Joel's residency card I filled out an online application with "Migri", the Finnish Immigration Services. That was easy enough thanks to both the address and marriage already having been registered in the population registry. We also had to get a passport type photo taken. Again, the main challenge in the application process was getting an appointment. We needed to go for an in-person identification meeting that was part of the process. Because of Covid and the shut-downs the previous spring the whole immigration process was completely backlogged, even worse than dealing with the DVV. We simply could not get an appointment in Helsinki despite trying numerous times over a few weeks. In the end we snagged a cancellation appointment in another city, Lahti, about an hour away. We made the appointment in November but the appointment wasn't till early January.
So in January we drove to Lahti. We found the office, waited a few minutes and got seen. They basically just looked at Joel's passport to verify who he was, took photocopies of it, got his electronic fingerprints and sent us off. I think they likely do a background check back in the US. I'm not sure what the process entails but from our perspective that is all there was to it. A few weeks later Joel received his first piece of Finnish mail: the residency card. Once he had that we applied for his KELA card i.e. his national health insurance card. Another few weeks and Joel got that in the mail too. Now he was legit, had a social security number and technically was all set to live, work (and pay taxes) and get sick in Finland. (At least for the next year since the residency card needs to be renewed annually.) Just in time for the ER visit that shortly followed! (See the post about cross-country ski jumping...)
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