Immigrants frustrated at German citizenship bureaucracy

Maria Zadnepryanets loved Germany when she first arrived. The Russian software developer came to North Rhine-Westphalia a decade ago to study and was amazed by what she found — the freedoms, the public services, the educational opportunities. Now, after a four-year battle with Berlin bureaucracy, she feels like "a second-class citizen."

"I came to Germany with a very naive idea of what it's like to live here," she told DW. "I thought that it's a fair place. My expectation was that people are treated equally by the state, and this experience has given me a different message."

In her first years in the country, she went out of her way to integrate: She learned German as quickly as she could, found a well-paying job in a modern sector where Germany needs workers and settled in the capital. In 2020, she submitted all her documents for naturalization in the Pankow district of Berlin — and then heard nothing, for months and then years.

After her emails were ignored, she consulted a lawyer, who suggested taking the Pankow office to court. But she decided against that, and in the fall of 2022 resorted to sending faxes to any official fax numbers she found — "to escalate my case," as she put it. In response, the office asked for more documents, which she sent — again, there was no response.

"How I understood things with this whole citizenship story was: I do my part, I work, I contribute, I learn the language, I integrate, and then after a certain period of time I will be given citizenship," she said. "It felt like I had done all these things, but that part of the deal was just not happening."

'German bureaucracy is not German at all'

Zadnepryanets isn't the only one — many skilled workers in Germany have formed social media groups where they vent their anger about dealing with German bureaucracy. In late June, some mounted a protest outside the LEA office in Berlin calling for "a fair and transparent processing of citizenship applications."

Many feel that only legal action will get them to the top of the pile — by filing a so-called "Untätigkeitsklage," or "failure to act lawsuit," against the immigration authorities. Such a complaint can be filed in Germany if an authority has not responded to an application for six months from the day on which the authority receives all the necessary documents.

One applicant who resorted to this was Imran Ahmed — he requested his name be changed for fear of prejudicing his case at the LEA, Berlin's immigration and citizenship authority. "By this time I have lost trust in the fairness of the authorities, and am worried that I will be punished for sharing my story," he told DW.

A Pakistani software engineer with a wife and young son, Ahmed submitted his application three years ago, when he had been in Germany for eight years, having earned a master's degree in Darmstadt and found a good job. He heard nothing for 18 months, when he was asked to provide newer copies of the same documents. "Since then, blackout," he said.

"I always wanted to come to Germany — the habits of German people were always something I could relate to: being on time, saying things in a straightforward way, being organized," he said. "But German bureaucracy is not German at all. In my workplace and everywhere else I've been blessed with seeing German punctuality and organization, but whenever you deal with the bureaucracy, it feels like it comes from a Third World country."

Frustrated and stressed by the long wait, which he said has led to health issues, Ahmed wrote to several members of the Berlin state parliament in January this year to ask how exactly the applications were being processed.

This year, the Berlin authorities switched systems in an effort to streamline naturalizations: By shifting the administration from the 12 municipal authorities to a centralized office for immigration and citizenship, the LEA. This authority replaced the previously required in-person interview with an online "quick check" to establish whether the applicant fulfilled the relevant conditions in terms of income, length of stay and language.

Laura Neugebauer of the Green Party was the only parliamentarian to reply to Ahmed's questions. Her party, in opposition in Berlin, submitted an official information request, which revealed that it was "almost impossible" for the LEA to process the oldest applications first, as it was receiving the applications from the municipalities in batches in which the date of the application was not noted.

"This was mindboggling for me," said Ahmed.

A mountain of old applications

A spokesperson for the LEA said he sympathized with people's frustrations, but said "many customers do not understand" that the LEA had been left with a mountain of 40,000 old applications to deal with following the transition in January. The oldest of these, the spokesperson said, dated from 2005.

"They understandably only see their individual waiting time and their desire for naturalization and quite rightly put it in the foreground," he said.

He also said it would actually be more inefficient to process the oldest applications first, since many of them may not be complete. "We are working through a mountain of work from several sides in order to naturalize as many people as possible as quickly as possible," he said.

Adam (name changed), from Egypt, suspects those who applied for citizenship before the new digitized system was introduced this year are being disadvantaged. He, too, checked all the necessary boxes: A steady income (he works as an engineer for a major German telecom company), good German language skills, and long enough residency. After waiting over two years, he received his citizenship earlier this year only after filing an Untätigkeitsklage.

However, the citizenship applications for his wife and three children, two of whom were born in Germany, are now stuck somewhere in the LEA's backlog. He has now filed more suits on their behalf, at a cost, he said, of over €3,000 ($3,600).

"There are people who applied online who are getting it in two or three months, and the people who applied offline, it's ignored," he said.

State aims to double naturalization rate

Berlin's Interior Minister Iris Spranger said the state aims to double the number of naturalizations per year to 20,000. The LEA said it is on track to make that target for 2024, but it still had to work on those 40,000 old applications.

"This is a huge challenge, not least because the number of applications has increased significantly since the reform of the nationality law came into force," the spokesperson told DW in an email.

Zadnepryanets is not impressed. "Those applications didn't come from the air," she said. "Why did these 40,000 applications happen? Who is responsible?"

And things are likely to slow down before they speed up, not least since naturalization laws were relaxed in June, which prompted a wave of new applications. According to the LEA, Berlin is currently receiving an average of 133 new citizenship applications every day and had already received over 25,000 this year. If that rate continues, the authorities can expect to receive over 48,000 new applications in 2024.

Despite this, local authority official Wiebke Gramm told the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper in January that the target for processing applications was now six months. That seems hopelessly ambitious to Zadnepryanets, who can't understand why more people aren't questioning the transparency and efficiency of the system.

"I'm just frightened of waiting another five years for anyone to touch my case," she said. She too is looking to take legal action after all.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.