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What to know about the new appointments system at Berlin immigration office

The difficulty of securing a visa appointment at the Berlin immigration authority is well known. A new appointments system aims to tackle part of the problem.

Published: 14 August 2024 12:28 CEST

The entrance to Berlin's Landesamt für Einwanderung (LEA). Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Jörg Carstensen

While long waiting times for visa appointments are common all around Germany, the problems at Berlin’s Landesamt für Einwanderung (LEA) have become notorious.

In previous years, third-country nationals would turn up in front of the overstretched immigration office in the middle of the night to stand a chance of getting a same-day appointment, with some people waiting in the cold from 2am until the authority opened its doors.

After walk-in appointments were scrapped, foreigners complained of months-long waiting lists and weeks where not a single appointment was available on the website at all.

This process was fertile ground for an exploitative business model that involved using automated bots to book up available appointments so that they could be sold on to desperate foreigners.

Sellers lurked on online forums, Telegram and social media groups offering paid-for appointments for people who were struggling to find them online. On black market websites like Appointments Berlin – which was designed to look similar to the official state website – appointments were sold for €50.

According to a statement on the LEA’s website, a new process for booking appointments is designed to end the practice of appointment resales.

“The LEA is fundamentally changing the procedure for allocating appointments with immediate effect,” it explained. “Appointments can no longer be booked via the previous online appointment system (OTV).”

OTV was taken offline a number of weeks ago for maintenance, but will now be permanently out of service.

“The main reason for this decision is that providers operating on the internet in particular had increasingly siphoned off the dates available on OTV in order to sell them,” the LEA added. “The basis for this abusive business model has now been removed.”

What does the new booking system look like?

In future, foreigners in Berlin will have two options for getting an appointment at the LEA: submit an application online or apply via contact form.

The LEA says it is aiming to digitalise its services fully over the coming years and has already made applying online possible for many types of visa or residence permit.

Applying for an EU Blue Card in Berlin, for example, can be done by filling in an online form and submitting it to the LEA digitally. After the application has been checked, applicants will be invited to an appointment to collect their residence permit.

You can see a full list of the permits and services that can be applied for online here on the LEA website. Over the coming weeks and months, permanent residency and student visas will be added to the list of possible online applications, according to the LEA.

An application form for a Schengen visa.

An application form for a Schengen visa. Photo: picture alliance / dpa | Ole Spata

If no online application is available for the service you need, appointments can be booked by filling in the contact form for the relevant department. You can find a full list of departments (organised by country of origin) on the Berlin website here, as well as links to their contact forms.

According to the immigration authority, ordinary requests for appointments should be submitted under the heading of “sonstiges”, meaning “other”.

When you submit your appointment request, you should mention:

What type of visa, permit or service you need
The details – including expiry date – of your current permit
Whether you require a Fiktionsbescheinigung to travel while waiting for your new document

It is a good idea to attach your completed application to your message, and any relevant evidence to ensure things move that little bit faster.

It’s also important to write your message in German. If you don’t speak German, online translation tools like DeepL can help.

Will this have any impact on waiting times?

The move to prevent appointments being booked up en masse should hopefully improve availability, though it’s unclear how much of an impact this will have on waiting times.

Last year, media reports revealed that some foreigners had to wait as long as six months for an appointment at the LEA. This was backed up by the recent testimony of a German relocation consultant, who said they had submitted a request under the new system for a client – and were offered an appointment in 2025.

pic.twitter.com/dw2aFRualM

— All About Berlin (@aboutberlin) August 13, 2024

Last summer, LEA director Engelhard Mazanke admitted in an interview with Tagesspiegel that his authority was “on the verge of dysfunctionality”. He pointed to a backlog of 10,000 unanswered emails in just a single department and the overwhelming number of applications the authority was receiving.

However, a spokesperson for the LEA said on Wednesday that waiting times had already been dropping off since July and now ranged from between one to three months, with further improvements expected.

The spokesperson also pointed out that online applications for permits like the EU Blue Card had already led to more efficiency and quicker appointments for applicants.

“Until the OTV was switched off, many of the appointments blocked by bots every day did not result in the registered customer attending and around 10 percent of all appointments expired unused,” he told The Local.

“The adherence to appointments via the online applications and contact forms is better, especially as unsuitable appointments can be cancelled and rescheduled by the customer.”

The LEA believes that the dual-pronged approach of digitalising services and making it harder to book unneeded appointments will continue to streamline waiting times in the future.

How can I get an urgent appointment?

In some cases, the LEA can provide an urgent Fiktionsbescheinigung – a kind of temporary residence permit – or a short-notice appointment to people facing an emergency.

However, they will have to provide proof that they fulfil one of the three following criteria:

They need to travel urgently within the next four weeks
They are at risk of losing their employment or study place if they don’t have a valid visa or permit
They are at risk of losing their benefits or other financial support if they don’t produce a valid visa or permit

The request for an urgent appointment should be submitted via contact form to the relevant department under the subject “Eiliger Termin/Notfall” (urgent appointment / emergency) as soon as possible. You should also attach evidence to support your case, such as booking information for international travel.

If your visa or permit expires before your appointment, there’s no need to worry, as long as you attempted to book the appointment while your permit was still valid.

Under German law, your residence permit is treated as still valid until the day of your appointment, even after it expires. Just keep hold of your contact form confirmation and your old permit as proof that you are still allowed to live, work and study in Germany.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.