After you graduate
Rules read 19 Aug 2026
What Chile's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Route to citizenship
Chile's Servicio Nacional de Migraciones (SERMIG, under the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security) states that a Letter of Naturalisation (Carta de Nacionalización) — a means of acquiring Chilean nationality under Article 10 No. 3 of the Constitution, formalised through a decree signed by the Minister of the Interior on the President's order — may be granted under three routes. The ordinary route (Article 2 of Decree Law No. 5.142) requires the applicant to be 18 or older, hold a currently valid Permanent Residence (Residencia Definitiva), and have 5 or more years of residence in Chile, counted from when they first obtained the Temporary Residence stamp that led to the Permanent Residence they now hold. A parallel route exists for a foreigner's child aged 14+ who holds Permanent Residence and the same 5-year residence history, with notarised parental authorisation. A faster 'qualified naturalisation' route (Article 85 of Law No. 21.325, the Migration and Foreign Nationals Law) requires only 2 years of continuous residence for a Permanent Resident who has one of several specific ties to Chile: being the spouse of a Chilean national for at least 2 years with the marriage registered in Chile and a shared household maintained throughout; being a blood relative of a Chilean up to the second degree, or someone adopted by a Chilean; or being the child of a parent who was Chilean but lost that nationality before the child's birth. This dataset found no SERMIG statement addressing dual nationality or a requirement to renounce the applicant's original nationality, so no claim is made on that point.
▸Show the source
New entry added 19 August 2026. One Chilean government domain added to IMMIGRATION_DOMAINS in scripts/verify.mjs: extranjeria.gob.cl (covering its tramites.extranjeria.gob.cl subdomain — Chile's Servicio Nacional de Migraciones digital-procedures portal, the actual reachable source used here). Collection note, flagged for a future collector: the main www.extranjeria.gob.cl domain (and specific pages like /visas/visa-de-estudiante/) returned a browser error page and a curl SSL principal-name mismatch on every attempt this pass, while the tramites.extranjeria.gob.cl subdomain worked reliably — a future collector chasing SERMIG content should go straight to the tramites subdomain. Chile's Migration and Foreign Nationals Law (Ley N° 21.325) full text was located on leychile.cl (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional) and its 'imprimir' (print) view did render real static text via the browser, but the full norm is very long (183,616 characters) and this project's page-text extraction truncates at 50,000 characters with no built-in pagination this pass could use to reach the Article 85 qualified-naturalisation text or any student-specific work-rights articles within the time available — the 5-year/2-year naturalisation criteria actually used above were instead found pre-summarised, with their own correct statutory cross-references (DL 5.142 and Ley 21.325 Art. 85), on SERMIG's own procedures portal. registrocivil.cl (Servicio de Registro Civil e Identificación, which also plays a role in Chilean nationality documentation) was checked but sits behind a CAPTCHA challenge this project cannot solve. workDuringStudy, postStudyWork and residencyRoute are all left null: this dataset confirmed that 'Propósito de Estudios' (Study Purpose) is one of the named Temporary Residence subcategories under Ley 21.325 (via SERMIG's own residence-permit overview, ver_ficha/245) but did not reach substantive text on work rights during study, a post-study bridge status, or the specific residence-length route from Temporary to Permanent Residence within the time available this pass — recorded as an absence of found information, not a confirmed 'no'; a future collector should pursue Ley 21.325's Título on Temporary Residence subcategories and its implementing Decreto 296 of 2021 directly, ideally via a tool that can paginate past leychile.cl's 50,000-character extraction limit. inDemandOccupations is left null for the same reason. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route': SERMIG publishes real, numbered residence-length and status criteria for both the ordinary and qualified naturalisation routes — per the doc comment on ResidencyPathway.naturalisationStatus this field records only whether criteria are published, not how demanding Chile's underlying Permanent Residence prerequisite is to reach. citizenshipTerms records the ordinary Carta de Nacionalización route: 5 years of residence, counted from the Temporary Residence stamp that led to the Permanent Residence the applicant currently holds, and requiring valid Permanent Residence at the time of application. The qualified-naturalisation route under Article 85 of Law 21.325 requires only 2 years but is limited to applicants with a specific Chilean family tie. dualCitizenshipAllowed is null: SERMIG’s page does not address renunciation.
Open the immigration authority's own page ↗