The Dark Side:
I have recently moved to Spain. In order to buy anything official like insurance, a flat, a car or a bank account – you have to pay for your bank accounts here – the foreign resident needs what is known as a NIE (a “foreigner’s identification number”). A month ago my wife and I made our first attempt to obtain one. Getting up early, we drove the forty-five minutes to the nearest NIE office in Marbella and arrived at 8.45, fifteen minutes before the office opened. When I asked the policeman who was guarding the queue of supplicants about the procedure, he told me we had arrived too late, that we should have acquired a ticket before 8.30, and that to be sure of a ticket it was advisable to arrive no later than 6.30. Needless to say, none of this was on the relevant website, which merely told the reader the opening hours and the forms he needed to fill out.
Today we tried again, this time in Málaga. We rose at 6.45 and arrived at the office at 7.30. The queue was short, and the duty policeman told us to wait until 9, when the office opened, before asking any questions. We stood with the others, outside, buffeted by a cold wind. By the gate was a poster, advising all those waiting that they needed photocopies of every page of their passports. Even the empty pages. This is apparently a new policy, as it does not yet appear on any of the relevant websites. Perhaps it is a job creation strategy, although even in as dire a recession as Spain finds itself in I find it hard to imagine how desperate you would have to be to apply for a position as a reader of empty passport pages. The Venezuelan behind us in the queue had not seen this poster by the time we started chatting to him at 8.45 – panicked that he would lose his place in the line, thereby condemning himself to returning another day (and taking another morning off work in a job market where employers call all the shots), he sprinted off to find the photocopy shop that I had located when the queue was in its infancy, and arrived back just in time to avoid ejection.
Gradually the queue filled up with North and West Africans, South Americans and a few Eastern Europeans. At around nine the doors opened, and those of us at the front were promoted to a wooden bench in the office yard. Half an hour later we were inside. There was one official dealing with the entire queue of around a hundred applicants – his colleagues were apparently all still at breakfast (my Venezuelan friend told me that the last time he had done this, five years ago, anyone not inside the building by twelve had had no chance of being seen that day: the office closed at two sharp and those still outside at midday were told to leave).
Of the half dozen people in front of us in the line, three – an African and two Moroccan women – left the office shaking their heads in despair; they had presumably not seen the new poster or had filled in the wrong forms or the right forms wrongly. At 10.15 we saw an official. We stood in front of his desk like errant schoolchildren summoned before the headmaster – there were no chairs. He did not look up as I handed over my documents. ‘Wrong office,’ he grunted (fortunately I understand Spanish). ‘Huh?’ ‘If it’s your first time, it’s another office.’ Still he did not look up. It wasn’t my first time – I had lived in Spain in the early nineties – but I doubted this would make any difference so instead asked him where the correct office was. ‘Ask the security guard.’ ‘Can’t you tell me yourself?’ ‘No, ask the security guard.’ It was as if he was being docked part of his salary every time he uttered a word. The ritual humiliation of any immigrant seeking assistance or even just politeness seemed to be an intrinsic part of his job.
The security guard was no better. ‘I don’t know what you want,’ he said. ‘Fill out this form and bring it back.’ ‘I can tell you what I want,’ I replied: ‘A foreigner’s identification number.’ ‘Are you both from the European Union?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Go to the police station then.’ ‘Is it too late to do it today?’ ‘No idea. Ask at the police station.’ We trudged off, shaking our heads, three hours of life wasted.
The Bright Side:
At the police station we were greeted with a smile by the guard on the door. He showed us to the room we needed, and a friendly woman there processed our application within twenty minutes of our arrival. We received the numbers we sought there and then.
We had evidently gone to the wrong place initially. This was dumb, but none of this was made clear on any website. The experience, however, gave us a glimpse of what non-EU citizens must go through to renew their permits to stay in Europe (one dreads to think what first-timers have to endure). Although there is no explanation for the rudeness, our Venezuelan friend suggested that the slowness of the process is probably deliberate. ‘If they did their job efficiently,’ he said before we left him to battle with the hostile official, ‘there would be too many people getting through.’
