I'll one up you and say that it's so broken, there are lots of people that basically live on ranges of exceptions.

In my case, I was told I was not eligible for the visa I needed but when I spoke to a migration consultant who knew the process, they managed to get it done. I was pretty shocked as this wink, wink, nod, nod style system is not something I expected from this country.

Yes, bureaucrats can act as gatekeepers for things that you are legally entitled to, and create various bureaucratic hurdles. It's usually mere thoroughness, sometimes incompetence, and if you cross them, vindictiveness.

I was told more than once by very knowledgeable people that if you anger a case worker, they can and will make your life hard by nitpicking every little detail and asking for as many documents as they can.

This happens for example if you get angry at their incompetence, or if you sue them for inaction (although in Berlin they see it as normal business by now).

This is so true . There is a word for it in German… behördenwillkür. Mean they can do with you as they please. Advocate insurance is a must here. I hate the bureaucracy here. Lawyers are the only help

Legal insurance does not cover immigration a lot of the time

Germany's head of state was involved in the biggest financial scandal of its existence and forgave a corrupt bank that stole millions of taxes just a few years before going into office.

corruption is spreading like a plague with no consequence in sight for anyone involved.

Olaf Scholz is the head of the government, Germany's head of state is its president, currently Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

If you believe corruption is just spreading now, you missed every single politician since the founding of Germany. Or every other country on the whole planet therefore.

Wikipedia documents that well enough.

This sounds like all of you are living in Berlin, which is known as "failed state" to the rest of Germany. ;-)

It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport could be collected 4 weeks later. Meanwhile an ex-colleague who lives in Berlin had to wrestle with his nearest office to even get an appointment for a passport renewal, then gave up and made an appointment with the office in the neighboring district, where it was still a 4 weeks wait. He told me there are districts where it takes up to 6 months.

I guess if you want pain and suffering, move to Berlin. :o)

Unfortunately, this is not just a problem limited to Berlin :-( [1][2]

It's been an absolute mess trying to secure my wife's settlement permit ("Niederlassungserlaubnis"). She has a german Master's degree, works in a government-funded research facility, and has been in the system since December 2022. We've now been ghosted for 14 months, only to be told to make an appointment to provide additional documents (which were not on the 'required documents' list they initially handed to us). After checking the appointment booking website to no avail, I came up with a python script that sends a notification to our phones when a new appointment pops up. It took 40 days of scraping until a new free appointment was available, only to be allowed to provide paper documents in person.

Adding to that, every six months, her employer threatens to fire her if she can't prove her legal status in Germany. So she's constantly jumping through hoops to get this temporary paper permit called "Fiktionsbescheinigung" just to keep her job. It's a hassle, costs €13 each time, and involves cycling through multiple unhelpful bureaucrats at the Ausländerbehörde's hotline (they do not answer emails) until finding one that very reluctantly produces this document.

All of this is beyond frustrating.

[1] https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/muenchen-kvr-auslaenderbeh... [2] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart/a...

Try Spain, takes years

I guess that depends on the city and the procedure, but I had to replace my DNI last summer and it took me less than 30 minutes, and they gave me the new one on the spot.

In comparison I also had to renew my Japanese foreign card and later my ID card, and both procedures were a royal PITA, and in both cases I had to wait a month to get the new card.

Yeah had a close person getting passport after marriage, took years, they made a mistake, another 1.5 years. Took over 5 years in the end.

Lawyers making mistakes, civil cervants making mistakes, making mistakes themselves. Big mess. They are actually breaking EU law while doing these things.

That actually was very interesting for me, living in Spain, how extremely common mistakes were in data entry, generally. If anyone hands you a form to check your details, you can almost guarantee to find some issue. I've never noticed this living in any other country yet.

Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, as long as you stay inside Schengen.

Please add a link for people relying on this info.

A link to what? Travel within the Schengen area is unrestricted, you can drive or fly to wherever you want and nobody will check passports.

This isn't true, this year I have been on a train from Marseille to Berlin and German police checked everyone on the train for passports at the border specifically to check residence validity - and removed one passenger with a residence permit as he attempted to reenter Germany (he was informed he was not initially permitted to leave)

Those are random spot checks, there's no border between France and Germany where everyone's passport will be checked.

"nobody will check passports"

"Those are random spot checks"

So there are random spot checks where people will check passports. So "nobody will check passports" is false.

Fine, word lawyer, "nobody will check passports above the base rate of passport checking you may get anywhere, including any random trip".

If you're going to risk your future permanent residency, it is very important to know exactly what that 'base rate' is. As someone who travels a fair bit within Schengen, I can tell you that the rate is quite high, much higher than it was a few years ago. And if you happen to look "un-European", the rate is quite a bit higher.

Not "passport", valid ID. Which can be required also when not crossing a border, so you should have one.

That's true, and if you're doing intra-Schengen travel to attend a relative's funeral, I'd consider risking it...

But otherwise: keep in mind that the freedom of movement is reserved to EU citizens (and their families): if you had to get a residence permit (and thus you're a non-EU national), you don't have the same rights.

Even without temporary (Covid, terrorism, etc.) internal checks, you can be stopped by police (national laws will differ) and be asked to show proof of id, and proof of your right to stay.

The fact that you have a pending residence application in progress will usually give the right to stay in the country that you applied in, but that proof might be as flimsy as as a stamped slip of paper (not even a A4 paper with a letterhead) and/or an email in the local language. Don't expect German police to be able to read and accept your Italian piece of paper, or viceversa Italian police to read and accept your piece of paper in German.

In fact, the same applies for non-EU family of EU citizens: the residence permits will be denied only in extreme cases (e.g. terrorism)... if you're just a non-EU citizen, there are even more situations in which that would apply. Imagine that the country that you applied in might refuse your residence permit: you'd then have to leave the country and Schengen (or file some kind of appeal), and that would make it even clearer that you wouldn't have right to stay in another Schengen country.

So, you might not have right to stay (in another Schengen country), and even if you might have it, proving your right might not be easy.

About the

> Please add a link

The original request could've made sense (you could have for example linked to directive 2004/38/EC , but that doesn't apply to people who aren't EU citizens or family of EU citizens)... but note that in this case we're trying to prove a negative (the laws will usually describe which rights you have, but not in which case you don't have such a right... you might find a guidance or case law document, but those are scarcer)

Again: the whole situation is really unfortunate, because the laws are also written with the expectation that you won't have to wait long after applying for the necessary documents. And even when the laws are clear about the timelines, the bureaucracy will try to weasel themselves out of it, for example Article 10 of the aforementioned directive states:

> The right of residence of family members of a Union citizen who are not nationals of a Member State shall be evidenced by the issuing of a document called "Residence card of a family member of a Union citizen" no later than six months from the date on which they submit the application. A certificate of application for the residence card shall be issued immediately

Of course, when we had to deal with it, the bureaucracy just asserted that until you show up for the appointment (which you had to wait more than 3 months for, since you originally applied), you haven't actually "submitted your application", yet.

As an EU citizen, realizing first-hand how slow, uncertain, and oppressive our immigration system is, really left a bad taste in my mouth... If you're not a citizen of the EU or an “Annex II” country, I wish you good luck when applying for a Schengen visa, but in case that you might get rejected: don't sweat it, and just consider other destinations, if you're planning a vacation... there are a bunch more places with friendlier visa policies (e.g. Turkiye, Cape Verde, Morocco, UAE, etc.)

Theoretically, yes.

Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.

Uhm, no - when did you try travelling last? I just crossed the border to Germany from Poland(both ways) and there is nothing there. And before that I drove over in January and there was a huge queue because of "checkpoints to combat illegal immigration" and that checkpoint was just a bunch of border guards standing there looking at cars passing by, they weren't checking passports or much of anything really, it's all just theatre.

Also did you forget flying?

I did get checked a few times while heading from the Balkans back to Germany. There are also random checks in buses and trains.

About five days ago, Szczecin → Berlin, stopped, had my documents meticulously examined and asked some typical questions I haven't been asked for a decade ("What's your proof of residence", etc).

I look like a typical WASP programmer in his forties, so no selection bias or something.

What counts as proof of residence in this case? Asking so I could prepare.

mObywatel is enough.

See also this marvel of brain damaged legalese: https://www.strazgraniczna.pl/pl/cudzoziemcy/najczesciej-zad...

I guess it's just random stops or some checkpoints are more stringent than others.

They pull out some cars, last winter I got pulled out at the border when I entered Germany from Austria. They wanted to see our passports and asked where we were going.

They wanted to see a valid national id of any shengen country, which are easier to get than passports (except in sweden, because it's the police releasing both, so might as well just get a passport).

National id is completely fine inside shengen. Please inform yourself before spreading misinformation.

"Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, just avoid the police, the border authorities and don't get caught."