Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

The Berlin immigration office is notoriously slow and unresponsive. The processing time for a residence permit varies from a few weeks to a few months. During that time, people are left unable to work or unable to leave the country. They never know how long it will take, and it causes some people to give up and leave Germany.

I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.

The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.

This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.

Sweden has the same problems, maybe I could build a similar tool for this market.

I was wondering how you collect and present data? Just self-reported or do you have some API to gather this information?

The immigration office does not collect data about the time it takes to process a case. I am building the infrastructure needed to poll my users at a date in the future.

Might it be on purpose, to low-key making immigration more difficult / discouraged? Europe seems to be under huge migratory pression.

I hear this a lot but I don't believe it. Every other office people - immigrants and natives - interact with is falling apart from lack of personnel, outdated processes, lack of digitalisation and excessive bureaucracy. This is just part of life in Berlin. Immigrants just have to do it all at once and feel it more.

If you look at the numbers, the Berlin office has double the workload it had five years ago, and a rather modest increase in headcount during the same time period. They can be fairly criticised for a lot of things, but malice is not one of them.

But if you wanted to discourage immigration, wouldn't you do exactly that? Reduce funding and increase bureaucracy in a system that's already creaking under the weight of a massive influx of immigrants?

You would not simultaneously reduce the immigration requirements and constantly stress the importance of foreign labour in the media.

You are a legend!

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