If you walk down Hirschelgasse in Nuremberg on a weekday morning, you’ll likely find a queue of people spilling out the door of a relatively nondescript building. You wouldn’t know it at first glance, but for some of the people in line, their future in Germany depends on a successful appointment inside.

This is the queue for appointments at Nuremberg’s immigration office. Asylum seekers, newly arrived workers and foreign nationals of every other residency status must pass through these doors to obtain or change their legal residency status in Germany.

The problem for many of them, however, is that they can’t. Not quickly enough anyway.

“Be prepared to wait at least three months for any kind of response,” reads a comment on the topic on an “Expats in Nuremberg” Facebook group. The commenter added that they had applied for an appointment through the immigration office’s website portal last September, and only received a reply in May.

And that’s just to get an initial appointment. Nuremberg residents who spoke to The Local said they had waited two or more years to secure their residency permits – a process that should in theory take no more than a few weeks.

A combination of staff shortages and a surge of incoming cases following Russia’s war on Ukraine has hit Germany’s immigration offices (Ausländerbehörde) particularly hard. Severe delays for visa and related services have become the norm in large cities around the country.

But foreign residents in Nuremberg suggest that the process in Franconia’s biggest city is exceptionally slow and frustrating.

‘Just waiting and waiting and waiting for nothing’

Nuremberg is Germany’s 14th largest city, and while it receives its fair share of tourists, it’s not always on the radar of most foreigners considering the move to Germany. 

But a few big multinational companies – including Adidas, Puma and Siemens – as well as a couple leading universities nearby attract a relatively large population of foreign workers.

READ ALSO: Five reasons foreigners should move to Nuremberg

In fact people from more than 160 nations live in Nuremberg. Of the city’s approximately 537,000 inhabitants, 147,710 do not have a German passport, according to information from the immigration office.

At about 27 percent of the local population, that’s significantly higher than the proportion of foreign residents in Germany overall, which was 18.4 percent in 2022 according to Germany’s statistical agency (Destatis).

It’s roughly equivalent to Berlin, where around a quarter of the city’s population are non-German. 

Unfortunately for the city’s 147,710 foreign residents, it seems the Nuremberg immigration office is poorly equipped to serve that large of a population.

Jon, a data scientist from the US, told The Local about how he and his wife had applied for EU permanent residence permits (EU Daueraufenthaltserlaubnis) through Nuremberg’s immigration office. 

He said they didn’t hear anything back from the immigration office for months, not even a confirmation of receipt.

“We were just waiting and waiting and waiting for nothing,” Jon said. 

Increasingly nervous about the approaching expiry dates of their current residency permits, after one year without any response, Jon and his wife hired a lawyer. Their lawyer wrote a letter enquiring about the status of their application which received no response. Six weeks later, the lawyer wrote again, threatening to sue.

Two days later Jon and his wife received appointments at the Ausländerbehörde. A couple of months after the appointment, they finally received their residency permits.

In total, it took 14 months for Jon to receive an appointment and nearly 17 months to receive his residency card. 

Living on a green slip in the post

Jon’s case is not unique.

There are plenty of posts in the Expats in Nuremberg Facebook group asking how to get the immigration office to respond. The immigration office website offers no contact email. Instead there’s an online portal where you can submit inquiries – though it’s unclear when foreigners can expect a reply. 

Advice on the topic is a mixed bag, hinting at a process that is not uniform in its regulations.

On one post a commenter suggests going to the immigration office early in the morning to try and get in without an appointment. 

Another commenter replies that they had tried this and were turned away by a staff member who explained that giving a walk-in appointment would effectively snatch an appointment from someone else in a very long and overbooked line.

Rhys moved to Nuremberg from the UK in August 2022 to start work at Adidas.

Arriving after Brexit, he was required to obtain a residency permit that would allow him to stay and work in the country. He had come with a permit that allowed him to stay for six months. So he applied to the immigration office early on, expecting to receive a longer term residency permit by February 2023.

READ ALSO: INTERVIEW – ‘A lot of people think Brexit is done, but it’s not for Brits in Europe’

But he heard nothing back from the immigration office during this time. Instead, about two weeks before his permit expired he received a green slip in the mail.

“The slip looked kind of ominous,” Rhys told The Local. He also said that it wasn’t immediately clear to him that the slip had anything to do with his residency – he initially threw it into a drawer and forgot about it.

The green slip turned out to be a Fiktionsbescheinigung (which funnily translates to ‘fictitious certificate’ but here means temporary residence certificate). “Basically it meant I could live here whilst still working as I waited for an appointment,” Rhys said. 

Another year went by with no word from the immigration office. A bit over a year later, another Fiktionsbescheinigung came in the post.

Rhys finally got an email announcing his appointment in May. He expects to finally pick up his residency card in a couple weeks: “Nearly two years to the day after moving” to Nuremberg.

READ ALSO: How German immigration office delays hurt lives of foreign workers

What’s the hold up?

Asked about the long delays on residency applications, Nuremberg’s Head of the Directorate for Citizen Service, Digitization and Legal Affairs, Olaf Kuch, listed a number of reasons why the immigration office has fallen behind in a statement provided to The Local.

First and foremost, Kuch noted that immigration offices across Germany have been overloaded with cases in recent years, especially following Russia’s war on Ukraine and the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

He added that immigration law is evolving rapidly in the country, and that “numerous authorities at various state and municipal levels are involved” in some cases which can create bottlenecks.

Kuch also emphasised that the immigration office is also experiencing a shortage of workers: “On average, about 15 percent of the positions are permanently unfilled,” he said. 

As to what Nuremberg’s immigration office is doing to cope with these challenges, Kuch said the authorities had tried to compensate by identifying cases that should be prioritised (based on imminent work requirements for example), or by issuing the aforementioned Fiktionsbescheinigung.

Finally Kuch pointed out that Nuremberg’s was “the first immigration office in Bavaria – if not nationwide – to be completely digitised since 2020”.

But those left to navigate Nuremberg’s completely digitised system are less enthused.

For his part, Jon emphasised that staff at the immigration office were helpful: “Whenever we went to the office and had an appointment and met the people, they were perfectly friendly.”

But he didn’t think much of the office’s digital platform: “That’s just useless.”

Immigration offices running better in small towns

Adding insult to injury, foreign residents in Nuremberg notice that their friends in the nearby towns of Fürth or Erlangen don’t seem to have many issues securing visa appointments.

“I have heard rumours that Erlangen is much better,” Jon told The Local.

Rhys also noted that a friend of his arrived in Fürth months after him and managed to secure an appointment well ahead of his.

Fürth is immediately next to Nuremberg. In some cases whether residents are subject to one city’s immigration office or the other is a matter of which side of the street they live on.

Since they serve smaller cities, the immigration offices in Fürth and Erlangen presumably have less cases to deal with. Still, those left waiting for years in Nuremberg question why the discrepancy is so severe.

“In Germany it seems that the unfairness [in immigration processes] is unequally distributed across geography,” Jon said, adding: “Any foreigner who is thinking of moving anywhere in Germany should consider the situation at the Ausländerbehörde.“