[nicbou]

I help German immigrants for a living. It's currently one of the hardest countries to settle in due to the archaic and labyrinthine bureaucracy. Berlin's immigration office is completely unable to handle its workload, delaying immigration to the point people just give up and leave.

I've been here long enough to apply for citizenship, but Berlin has a backlog of 26,000 applications and literally refuses new ones until they centralise the processing. The new central office is expected to handle 20,000 applications per year.

This is the city where you need an in-person appointment weeks in the future to register your address, a key process that many other things depend on.

All of this can only be done in German, of course.

If Germany wants to attract talent, it has to meet it in the 21st century.

[FirmwareBurner]

Maybe Berlin has just reached maximum occupancy? I mean, we'd all like to live in our favorite dream city, but how long is that sustainable long term, if we all move to one city?

Germany seems like it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants more migration to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing prices, but that's it, it does nothing to actually make life pleasant and attractive for the people moving there to live and work, in terms of taxes, bureaucracy and housing, so you just feel like cattle, exploited for your ability to pay taxes to the state and to pay someone else's mortgage.

[jamil7]

I don’t think the city is full, just poorly run. The rest of your comment I agree with though.

[FirmwareBurner]

>I don’t think the city is full

Yeah but then why is finding housing nearly impossible? It's not like tones of apartments are sitting empty without occupancy because "the city is inefficient but not full".

[disgruntledphd2]

I mean Berlin is just catching up to other European capitals in that regard. The weird thing about Berlin was always how cheap it was, which was basically an accident of history.

[nicbou]

Berlin is not full. The bureaucracy is inefficient and understaffed. Almost all of it is still paper-based and rely on in-person appointments. Like I said, it needs to enter the 21st century but it's just not happening.

This was a problem a decade ago and nothing really changed.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Berlin is not full.

Is it tough? There would be tones of empty rental apartments on the cheap if it weren't full, but the obscene state of the housing/rental market right now vastly contradicts you, and it's not because of bureaucracy, it's because there's too little places to live relative to the insane demand of people wanting to live and move there. Maybe you live in a bubble and haven't looked at the rental market in a while?

[brazzy]

Berlin is infamously badly governed. It should not be considered representative of Germany as a whole.

[nicbou]

Other Ausländerbehörde are just as bad, although other services are indeed far worse in Berlin.