I did a couple of phone calls today. There is good news and bad news.
The good news is that it seems that a valid national ID (passport, ID card) is not required for registering Serse’s residence at the Kreisbüro, only the birth certificate is. This means that, as soon as we receive the birth certificate, we can take care of residence permit (and consequently social insurance, healthcare card etc) and national ID (at the Italian Consulate) in parallel, hopefully speeding up things a little bit.
The bad news is that there is not much to speed up compared to the initial timeline estimates: the legalized documents from Taiwan have not reached the Zivilsthing office in Zerneve yet, and anyway the processing waiting time is currently 2-4 weeks. Moreover, since Serse is not Swiss, once registered for residence at the Kreisbüro we will not receive his residence card immediately. First we have to wait for the Immigration Office to invite us for the scheduled ritual photograph session, and then wait until they send us the residence card. Problem: since the Immigration Office is currently overwhelmed by the Ukrainian refugees crisis, waiting time for this is at least two months. AYFKM.
The smart reader might think the following. When we go to the Immigration Office for the scheduled ritual photograph session, they will enter Serse in their system and they will immediately assign him an AHV (social insurance) number. We could ask them nicely to tell us immediately, even informally, this AHV number. This way, we could already request a health card and apply for tax benefits in advance, before waiting forever for the residence card to arrive, right? To speed up things a tiny little bit further?
This is exactly what we did for Penelope, and the nice old man at the desk wrote Penelope’s newly assigned AHV number on a piece of paper and gave it to us. After many cursed events later, we found out it was wrong. The guy mispelled the AHV number. AYFKM.
In any case, one thing to realize is that the Swiss residence card will help us show that Serse exists and avoid being stopped and tortured interrogated by a Swiss police patrol within Switzerland in the unlucky case we are caught in a random check, e.g. by car. But it will not be a valid document for traveling abroad, not even within Schengen. For that, we need to go through the Italian Consulate. Looking forward to that!
