Residence permit

A residency permit is a document or card required in some regions, allowing a foreign national to reside in a country for a fixed or indefinite length of time. These may be permits for temporary residency, or permanent residency. The exact rules vary between regions. In some cases (e.g. the UK) a temporary residency permit is required to extend a stay past some threshold, and can be an intermediate step to applying for permanent residency.

Residency status may be granted for a number of reasons and the criteria for acceptance as a resident may change over time. In New Zealand the current range of conditions include being a skilled migrant, a retired parent of a New Zealand National, an investor and a number of others

Some countries have adopted biometric residency permits, which are cards including embedded machine readable information

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Wikipedia