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With the "Law on the Reorganization of Responsibilities in Citizenship Matters", the Berlin House of Representatives decided on 11.07.2023 that naturalizations will no longer be processed by the district offices in the future, but by a central department at the State Office for Immigration (LEA) (Department for Citizenship Matters). This department will be housed in a new office building, i.e. will not be located within the premises of the Berlin Immigration Office at Friedrich-Krause-Ufers 24. Some of the current employees of the district offices will be transferred to the Berlin Foreigners' Registration Office and will continue to work from there. In addition, around 120 new employees will be recruited.
The main reason for the changes was that the division of responsibilities in naturalization matters did not bring the hoped-for increase in efficiency. On the contrary, applications were sometimes checked twice, files had to be sent back and forth between the authorities and there were problems with the delimitation of responsibilities. As a result of this additional administrative burden, the already overlong naturalization procedures at the Berlin district offices only became even longer. In some cases, it was even necessary to wait a year or longer for the initial consultation appointment for the application, meaning that a considerable amount of time had already passed before the application could even be submitted. It is to be expected that these unacceptable conditions will become even worse in the future, as the reform of citizenship law will further increase the number of applications and the Syrians who immigrated in 2015 have now reached the required residence periods for naturalization.
By bundling responsibilities at the LEA, the main aim is to create synergies in order to increase administrative efficiency and quality. In addition, the LEA's expertise in the field of immigration and residence law is to be used to increase processing speed. This specialization and division of labour should reduce the number of incorrect decisions and thus the administrative burden. In addition, the LEA's digital infrastructure is to be used to enable naturalization applications to be submitted digitally for the first time.
Overall, it should be noted that the reform is to be welcomed in principle. At the same time, however, it is expected that the change in responsibility will initially lead to considerable delays in processing applications, as the authority will first have to familiarize itself with the changed work processes. It is particularly explosive that the number of pending naturalization procedures is already around 27,000 (2023), although the figures from the Ministry of the Interior show that only 8,000 naturalizations are actually carried out each year. If we also take into account that around 800,000 foreigners live in Berlin, of which around 250,000 meet the requirements for naturalization, it is easy to calculate how long it will take to process the outstanding applications. From a legal perspective, the authorities actually only have three months to process the corresponding naturalization applications. Once the three months have expired, the applicant has the option of filing an action for failure to act with a lawyer specializing in migration law. However, a processing time of three months has so far been completely unrealistic. In the past, only the district office in Mitte has even come close to this period, with an average processing time of five months. Unfortunately, even the courts can only partially counteract this, as they too are now massively overloaded. Although the naturalization process can be accelerated there, the administrative court in Berlin also needs several months to process the corresponding complaint. The extent to which the new law can remedy this situation remains to be seen.