I would like to thank the Treaty of Maastricht

Last Wednesday I went back to the DRCL (Direction de la Réglementation et Contrôle de la Légalité, or the immigration office) to pick up my carte de séjour, or residency permit. As I've explained earlier on this blog, I entered French Polynesia on a British passport, without a visa, having been told both by the website of the French Foreign and European Affairs Ministry and the French Consulate in San Francisco that European Union citizens do not (indeed cannot) obtain visas for stays of any duration in French Polynesia. All you are required to do is arrive, and submit an application for a carte de séjour to the DRCL within 3 months. This made sense, and was consistent with the right of EU citizens to reside in any EU country. This principle, of course, has many exceptions. I was to discover one of these exceptions upon my arrival at Faa'a Airport last July.

When I arrived at Immigration last July, I told the official that I would be applying for a carte de séjour. She immediately asked me if I had a carte de séjour. I told her I did not because I would be applying for one. She told me that I needed to obtain the carte de séjour before arriving in French Polynesia. I told her that was the exact opposite of what I had been told by the French Consulate in San Francisco. She asked me if I had a return ticket. (This whole conversation was being conducted in French at a point when I had a lot of difficulty with understanding what was being said to me.) I did not understand the question which she repeated several times in French, until she repeated it angrily in English. I told her I had no return ticket. I was taken aside, told to go get my bags from the baggage claim, and to go wait inside the Immigration office. I was bewildered. How am I supposed to be required to have a return ticket if I have the right to spend any length of time in French Polynesia? How am I supposed to have a visa or a carte de séjour if the French Consulate told me that I cannot obtain one until I arrive?

I waited for an hour, nervously, in the immigration office. After sitting for about twenty minutes in a little anteroom, I poked my head into the administrative room and told them that I had gotten all my bags. This pissed them off. Eventually, an immigration official who was much nicer appeared, spoke a little English to me, and said that they were going to buy me an overseas one-way ticket, probably to the Cook Islands, so I could be legally let into French Polynesia. He led me and my bags past Customs and over to an Air Tahiti travel agent, explained my situation, and left. I showed them my one-way ticket and my UK passport. She asked for my credit card, and used it to buy a one-way ticket back to Los Angeles, with no date but "Fully Refundable: Immigration Purposes Only" handwritten in English across the top. She showed me the price in sterling (£660), which didn't seem too bad, until I remembered the conversion rate, and was thankful she hadn't bought me a ticket to London. I was free to go--and even made it on time to my Air Moorea flight at 8 pm.

A few days after this mess, I went to Air Tahiti Nui to try to get my ticket refunded, and was told that I needed my carte de séjour in order to get my $1400 back. This was clearly going to take a while, so I went ahead and paid off the credit card debt, and was thankful that this year I was on a bigger fellowship than last year and could actually afford to do this.

It turns out that my carte de séjour had actually been approved way back on December 6, but for some reason the mail never made it to my landlord's mailbox, and I only found this out at the end of January when they called me. Getting the carte de séjour itself was pretty fast, because instead of being a specially-made plastic card like the American or Japanese equivalents, the carte de séjour is a piece of card paper folded in half with my photo glued to it and the information written out by hand. It was all kind of anticlimactic. Now, six months and sixteen days after my arrival in French Polynesia, I am a resident--for the next five and a half months. I was going to ask at the DRCL if I could register to exercise my right as an EU citizen to vote in municipal elections in March, but I decided not to push my luck.

Now that I'm legal here, I went ahead and filed to get reimbursed by Air Tahiti Nui. I can also renew my US passport, which is set to expire at the beginning of June, before I plan to go back to the US. This is a bit of a hassle too, because there is no US consulate here, and I have to renew it at the US Embassy in Suva, Fiji. On Friday I sent off the application and my old passport from FedEx in Faa'a on Friday. There are no direct air links to Fiji from Tahiti, so it has to be sent via New Zealand.