Relocating Using a Service

When relocating to Luxembourg, you or your company might find it easier to hire the services of a relocation agency to navigate the immigration process with you. These companies will generally have good working relationships with staff at the government and know the process inside-and-out. They know what documents are needed, what level of information will generally be acceptable, and how to move the process along as quickly as possible.

Keep in mind as you go through the immigration process that the only identification that has any value is your passport, and each family member must have a passport in order to relocate. State or provincial licenses or identification are meaningless once you leave your home country.

Our Personal Experience

When we relocated, we used a service provided by my wife’s employer. The process started while we were still in the USA where we received a list of documents we needed to have copied and notarized (having the copies notarized was an acceptable form of a “certified copy” for the immigration officials in Luxembourg). It will help if you schedule a few hours with a notary because it can take up the better part of an afternoon if you have a family.

Phase 1 – The Copy Blitz

With a family of four, we needed to provide certified copies of:

• All pages of each family members passports – even blank and cover pages
• Copies of academic degrees
• Affidavit of (non) criminal history

In our case, we have a multi-home family for our kids and the children’s mother was required to sign a letter acknowledging and approving the relocation. A certified copy of her passport was also required.

All these documents were assembled and sent via DHL, ahead of our arrival, to the company assisting us in our relocation process

Phase 2 – The Immigration Shuffle

Following the delivery of our Copy Blitz packet, we arrived in Luxembourg and were met by a representative of the agency in the lobby of our hotel. He had about two days of scheduled visits required to complete the next phase of the process. They are not long days, but he threaded our schedule through known working hours of the different offices we would have to visit.

An important note: you will need an address in Luxembourg to become a resident, and for the first several months our Luxembourg address was our hotel. Upon check-in, our hotel manager provided us with a letter confirming our reservation – which was in-turn used as confirmation of our residential address.

During the shuffle we visited:

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministère des Affaires ètrangères) for an Arrival Declaration – Pending Registration
• A local doctor who performs a physical and gets a brief medical history
• A lung Xray and skin prick test for TB
• Return visit to get the results of the TB test a couple days later
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministère des Affaires ètrangères) – Arrival Declaration – Residency Permit

Phase 3 – Final Steps

Once the Immigration Shuffle was done, we had to wait a few weeks while all the paperwork was processed within the government. When that is done, the a letter comes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which is required for biometric identification processing. This is relatively easy  – it’s  your finger prints and a photo. After that, we picked up our official ID card about 5 working days later at the same office that took our pictures.

We had an additional step that involved filing a change of address with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, showing our move from the hotel to our permanent address once we found a place to stay.