Venezuela

Venezuela has no separate retirement visa. A pension is named inside the category for people of independent means, the TR-RE, in the same breath as any other lawful unearned income, and it is held to the same figure: the equivalent of USD 1,200 a month generated abroad, plus USD 500 a month for each family member travelling with you. A pensioner is not asked for less and is not offered anything extra. The closed list of visa classes in the resolution has no age-related category of any kind.

Work needs two separate permissions and they are given by two different ministries. The labour ministry issues the labour authorisation, and the Act makes it the employer's job to apply for it, not yours. The interior ministry then authorises the TR-L visa once the labour ministry has agreed. The visa lasts a year with multiple entries and a year of stay, renewed for equal periods once the labour authorisation is confirmed again; the Act says the visa lasts exactly as long as the labour authorisation does. After one uninterrupted year the interior ministry may grant Resident status. Short assignments are exempt from the labour authorisation altogether where they run ninety days or less.

Nothing in the Venezuelan instruments we could read gives a South American national a residence route of their own. Venezuela is a full member of Mercosur whose membership is suspended in all the rights and obligations of a member state, and it is not a member of the Andean Community, whose own migration statute lists its members as Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The catalogue of visas names twelve classes and not one of them is defined by nationality. What the Venezuelan instruments do contain are saving clauses: the Act applies without prejudice to treaties and integration agreements, entry requirements give way to conventions the Republic has signed, and one visa - the entrepreneur's - excepts nationals of countries Venezuela has agreements with, without naming any.

Naturalisation takes ten years of uninterrupted residence, cut to five if your original nationality is Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or that of a Latin American or Caribbean country. Marriage to a Venezuelan is its own route at five years from the wedding. Venezuela does not ask you to give up the nationality you have - the Constitution says in terms that Venezuelan nationality is not lost by taking another, and the nationality law says a naturalised Venezuelan is not obliged to renounce theirs. Once granted, naturalisation can only be taken away by a court judgment. The decision on an application is due within six months.

A tourist visa is valid for a year with multiple entries and allows ninety days of stay, which the interior ministry may extend once by the same period. The passport must have at least six months left. The instrument that sets this out is a joint resolution of three ministries made in December 1999; the foreign ministry's own page for the tourist visa asks for several things the resolution does not - a medical certificate issued by the health authority of your country, a hotel booking or a notarised letter of invitation, and a return ticket. Which nationalities need no visa is not something we could read in any instrument: the resolution exempts holders of a tourist card issued to nationals of beneficiary countries and nowhere says which countries those are.

One category covers people who live on income they do not work for: the transient person of independent means, TR-RE. It asks for the equivalent of USD 1,200 a month in lawful income or pension generated abroad, and a further USD 500 a month for each family member travelling with you. The visa runs a year with multiple entries and a year of stay, and is renewed for equal periods on proof that the foreign income still exists. After one uninterrupted year in the country the interior ministry may grant Resident status, renewed every five years. The thresholds were set in December 1999 and the foreign ministry still publishes the same two figures.

The investor visa, TR-I, is unusual in two ways. It states no amount at all: what it asks is that the investment has been accepted by the Venezuelan official bodies, and the foreign ministry turns that into a single document, an investor certificate issued through the foreign trade single window. And it is the most generous of the transient visas on time - three years, multiple entries, no limit on how long you may stay - then up to two more years applied for inside the country, and only then may you ask for Resident status. There is a second business category, the entrepreneur/industrialist visa, which looks similar and is not on the list of visas that lead to residence.

The student visa, TR-E, covers higher technical or university study, specialisation and internships in your field. It runs a year with multiple entries and a year of stay, and is extended at the interior ministry's discretion on proof that the studies continue. The letter that matters is from the institution: it has to say what financial means you will have in Venezuela. The student visa is not on the list of visas that lead to Resident status.

There is no residence category for descent. The catalogue of visas names twelve classes and none of them is granted because a grandparent or a parent was Venezuelan. What descent gives you is the nationality itself, directly: a child born abroad to a Venezuelan parent is Venezuelan by birth under the Constitution, on conditions that depend on whether the parent was Venezuelan by birth or by naturalisation. The nearest thing to an ancestry visa runs the other way - the family visa reaches the parents of a Venezuelan, not their adult children.

The family visa for a Venezuelan's relatives, TR-FV, runs a year with multiple entries and no limit on how long you may stay, and is extended inside the country. It reaches further than a spouse: minor children, parents and parents-in-law are in the same article. The resolution and the foreign ministry disagree about one thing that decides whether you qualify. The resolution gives the visa to a spouse only where the marriage took place abroad and was registered at a Venezuelan consulate, and requires the family to travel with the Venezuelan to settle in the country. The ministry's own page drops the travel condition and accepts a marriage celebrated in Venezuela as well. Naturalisation by marriage is separate and slower: five years from the date of the marriage.

Venezuela taxes a resident on income from anywhere in the world and a non-resident only on income arising in Venezuela. The day count is 183 days, and the way it is written is unusual enough to be worth reading slowly. The income tax law defines who is not resident: someone whose stay does not run beyond 183 days in a calendar year and who is not domiciled in Venezuela under the tax code. Its sole paragraph then says when such a person is treated as resident - when they have stayed a continuous period of more than 183 days in the calendar year immediately before the year being taxed. So it is the previous year that is counted, and it has to be a continuous spell, which is not how most of the region writes the same test. A non-resident individual is taxed at a flat 34 per cent.

Access does not turn on your immigration status. The Constitution makes health a social right the state must guarantee and says that all persons have the right to the protection of health; the public system it requires is governed by principles that include free provision and universality. The health law repeats it from the service side: health services guarantee the protection of health to all the inhabitants of the country and work without discrimination of any kind. None of these texts distinguishes a foreigner from a national, and the immigration Act says separately that foreigners have the same rights as nationals.

Only one body issues, renews, suspends or revokes a Venezuelan licence: the national land transport institute. To drive you must carry a current licence of the grade matching the vehicle, plus a current comprehensive medical certificate, which the health ministry issues free of charge. What the Act does not do is say anything about foreigners. It delegates that whole question - everything to do with granting licences to foreigners - to its own regulation, and we could not find a regulation made under this Act. A vehicle brought in by a tourist under an international agreement may circulate on its home plates for the length of the legal stay, provided it carries civil liability cover.