1. What documents do I need?
You need your:
- Birth Certificate
- Marriage Certificate
- Antecedentes Penales in your home country
- Antecedentes Penals in Argentina
I may be forgetting something, I'm doing this from memory
All of your documents from your home country will need to be sent to the Argentine Embassy in your country for legalizacion. They charge about 50 bucks a document if I remember correctly.
Then you need to get these documents translated by an official translator from the Colegio de Traductores. You can have this done here. It is about 125 - 150 pesos a document. Plus the sellado for each one, which is about 35 pesos a document.
If you want I can pass you our translators details, she was relatively cheap but you have to take the papers yourself over to Corrientes for the sellado.
You also need your passport to have more than 6 mos, and possibly even 12 mos left on it. I can't remember exactly, I just know that i had to get mine renewed in order to do it. Cha-ching there goes another 100 bucks or so -- if you're Canadian and you have to renew outside of Canada it can cost up to 180 bucks!
2. What sort of residency do I get? (permanent or temporary)
You'll have to renew your residency (or DNI) I always mix up which is which 3x before it becomes permanent as far as I remember.
3. How long does it take?
Yikes. Well from the time of getting your docs legalised in your home country, getting them sent down here, taking them to be traduced, getting your antecedentes penales, getting a turno, to getting everything issued, well if you're lazy like us it's going to be a year or so, lol. But you do have to do certin things in an orderly fashion or the sellados will expire. I think once you've had your turno for a spouse it's only supposed to be 60 days to issue your residency, I haven't looked it up and as I say we're lazy so we're still at the step of getting my Antecedentes penales (and we've been putting this off because we're right now not even sure if we're going to need the residency for me or if we're going to be moving on from Argentina before it even gets issued).
4. Does having a lawyer help? (as in, does it happen faster)
I have no idea.
As far as I'm concerned if you haven't committed a crime in the past and you speak the language there's no reason to spend the extra cash on the lawyer.
By the time you pay the consulate fees, the translator fees, the colegio de traductores, the police / FBI for your criminal records, and if you're unlucky like me and have to get a new birth certificate because your original one is rejected for being "too old" -- jeez, thanks, what does that say about me?? -- you're going to have shelled out quite a few hundred dollars -- oh and all your postage costs.
I haven't even paid the residency fee yet and I've already racked up:
us$20 postage fees to send birth, marriage, and police certs to Embassy-- oh original birth certificate rejected so new one=
us$35 new birth certificate
us$20 more postage
us$30 police report at home -- oh rejected because it doesn't have the Dept Foreign Affairs seal on it so:
us$150 DFAIT stamp
us$50 rush on DFAIT stamp so police report wouldn't expire
us$20 postage fees
us$100 new passport
us$50 legalizacion of birth certificate at Argentine consulate
us$50 " " marriage " "
us$50 " " police " "
THEN:
$380 pesos translation fees
$135 seals from Colegio de traductores
So I'm at approx $700 usd for the process already (granted the passport renewal would have had to happen regardless)
If you're from a different country you may be lucky and not have to do all the bs of sending things to the embassy etc, but really, everyone wants their piece of the pie, so although the 600 pesos or whatever it is sounds cheap for the residency, the extra costs add up quite a bit.
