Due to critical renewal lag times at Immigration, the government will renew 55,000 residencies automatically.  The lucky foreingners are those whose residency cards expire from December 1st and July 1st of 2007. Mario Zamora, Immigration Director, told La Nacion that the a decree will be published in the next few days in the official newspaper La Gaceta.

He said that the actual system cannot handle more than 200 foreigners per day and Immigration is saturated. “The bottleneck is that when a person comes to the window their file is not found.  So we have to ask them to return the following week. while we look for the documents.  So the lines get backed up until there is a crowd like on Thursday. ”

Zamora warned that the 7 month lapse established by the decree will allow Immigration to reform and organize the residency department once and for all. There are 600,000 legal residents in the country, that must renew their residency every 2 years according to the regulations.  Since Immigration can only handle 200 renewals per day they would need 1500 days in the year to handle the 300,000 annual renewals.

The situation reached a crisis point on Thursday, when people who had arrived at 3 am were not attended to by Immigration.  In addition, people who make appointments online are given dates that are longer than 1 year.

Stay tuned for details once the decree is published.