The sometimes months-long waiting time for an appointment for the visa application is considered a bottleneck when migrating to Germany for work.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin German embassies and consulates issued significantly more visas in the past year than in the two previous years. However, the level of the pre-Corona year 2019 has not yet been reached again.
As the Federal Foreign Office writes in its answer to the written question from the CDU member of the Bundestag Marc Biadacz, a total of 1,265,391 visas were issued last year and 211,699 applications were rejected. A total of 1,477,090 visa applications were decided.
A year earlier, the 174 visa offices of the German missions abroad had only processed 697,222 visa applications, of which 92,772 were rejected. In the first Corona year 2020, 91,165 of the 654,544 processed applications were rejected, according to statistics from the Federal Foreign Office.
Sometimes the waiting time is months
In the pre-Corona year 2019, the visa offices processed a good 2.5 million visa applications. The figures show that after Corona, the number of visa applications for Germany rose again quickly, Biadacz, who is chairman of the Union faction in the Committee on Labor and Social Affairs, told the Handelsblatt. However, the visa authorities are already “far beyond their capacity limits”.
The sometimes months-long waiting time for an appointment for the visa application is considered a bottleneck when migrating to Germany for work. “Orderly and controlled immigration into our country and especially into our labor market can only succeed if we finally end the administrative backlog in 174 different, analogue visa offices and pool and digitize competencies centrally,” stressed Biadacz.
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The response from the Federal Foreign Office shows how necessary this is. The ministry is currently unable to break down the number of visas issued according to different types, such as for employment migration or for family reunification.
The data on the visa applications is recorded decentrally on servers at each of the 174 visa offices, a central evaluation is not possible, the officials write. “A detailed individual evaluation would take at least two weeks of working time and would require manual counting, including a review of each individual paper process.”
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) announced a radical reform of the visa procedure during a joint visit to the Federal Office for Foreign Affairs (BfAA) in mid-January.
Not only do they want to hire more staff for processing, they also want to turn the process “upside down”. The current system, which is more based on the past century, has a rather deterrent effect on many who wanted to come to Germany to work or study, said Baerbock.
More: Baerbock announces reform of the visa process