The director of Berlin’s local immigration office has announced that the authority is developing a new online service for booking visa appointments, which will be launched by summer 2024.
Many non-Germans in Berlin are plagued by the nigh inevitability that when the time comes to book their next visa appointment, there will be no appointments available. This is largely thanks to a lack of staff in the city’s administrative offices and the increasing bureaucratic clunkiness in an overburdened system.
Now, Engelhard Mazanke, director of the city’s Landesamt für Einwanderung (LEA), colloquially known as the Ausländerbehörde, has announced that the office will launch a new online service for booking visa appointments.
“We are reorganising the online appointment service with a completely new system,” Mazanke told members of the Berlin House of Representatives, according to Tagesspiegel, explaining that the new service should be ready by May 31. However, the changes, such as a two-factor authentication system, will not be visible to platform users until August.
In Mazanke’s own words, Berlin’s Ausländerbehörde is so overwhelmed that it is “nigh dysfunctional”, one consequence of which has been the eruption of an illegal, online market where technology-savvy opportunists write code that books up appointments before they become publicly available and then sell them on to desperate visa holders.
According to Mazanke, the two-factor authentication system which will soon be adopted should mean that such opportunists cannot “easily access appointments by technical means”.
In another damning self-evaluation, Mazanke admitted to Tagesspiegel that his administration was still in “multifunctional crisis” and on the verge of dysfunctionality, but was now “on the road to recovery”.
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