Child Of Sorrow
The City of Vienna's immigration reforms have made services more professional and accessible and but have failed to tackle its citizenship application backlog
Servus!
Vienna is now a city of two million people for the first time since the early twentieth century. This is the consequence of rapid population growth, with Vienna gaining almost half a million residents over the past 20 years or so. Such a boom has presented enormous challenges to the municipality in terms of housing, education, healthcare, and public transport provision. Vienna is a city of cranes, with thousands of new apartments being built every year. The first sections of the expanded U2/U5 underground lines should come online in 2028.
The nature of Vienna’s population growth has also tested the city’s immigration department, the MA35. While the number of Austrian citizens living in Vienna has remained more-or-less constant since 2002, the population of non-Austrian citizens has exploded. In 2002, 257,537 non-Austrian citizens lived in Vienna. By 2023, that figure had more than doubled to 679,080. More non-Austrians means more residency permit applications for the MA35 to process. Right now, about 150,000 case files pass through the MA35 annually, with the majority belonging to non-EU citizens, which are inherently more complicated and time-consuming.
The MA35 has long been the City of Vienna’s problem child: a hostile environment plagued by incompetence and inefficiencies. Those who have dealt with the MA35 will have their own horror stories. Mine is that I was the victim of a kind of Kafkaesque psychological terror when I tried to do something as simple as book an appointment to lodge a permanent residency application back in 2022. That process of making an appointment ended up lasting about six months, and it was only after numerous phone calls, emails, and letters of complaint all the way up to the interior ministry that I ended up seeing an MA35 case worker at all1.
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Back in 2020, when deputy mayor Christoph Wiederkehr (NEOS) took on the integration portfolio, he prioritized reforming the MA35. At a press conference held Monday, he presented the fruits of his labor. Since the end of 2021, the average time it takes to process a residency permit application has fallen by 32.8 percent. The wait time for an appointment regarding a residency permit has decreased to seven days. Having set up a call center in December 2021, people can now get through to someone at the MA35 in 74 seconds. The department has also digitized many of its services, while key and highly skilled workers can now take advantage of the Business Immigration Office, established to assist them through the permit application process.
Wiederkehr and the MA35 have been less successful, however, in dealing with the citizenship application backlog. A confluence of factors has caused the number of citizenship applications the MA35 has to deal with to mushroom. Asylum seekers who arrived in Vienna during the 2015 migration crisis began to become eligible for citizenship in 2021, and the MA35 has sole responsibility for processing applications from victims or descendants of victims of National Socialism. Even though the MA35 has recruited and trained more personnel since the reform process began, for those living in Vienna who want to apply for citizenship, the wait time for an initial appointment or consultation remains one year.
As the number of citizenship applications from descendants of victims of National Socialism declines over the next few years, one would expect to see wait times for an in-person citizenship application appointment go down too. Still, questions about the MA35 reform process remain. The call center has been a positive development, and while its staff are polite and professional, whether they are truly empowered is another matter. The MA35 doesn’t just need more bodies at desks, but genial and sympathetic case workers who fully comprehend the immigration rules they are implementing. In that sense, the MA35’s problems derive in part from the law itself. There is only so much the City of Vienna can do when federal immigration and citizenship law remains so convoluted and arcane.
Bis bald!
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Divided Austria (1)
A second major demonstration against far-right extremism, supported by over 100 NGOs and five political parties, will take place in Vienna on March 23 on Ballhausplatz outside the federal chancellery. The first protest at the end of January in front of parliament attracted at least 35,000 people.
Divided Austria (2)
A new poll conducted by Peter Hajek for ATV and Puls 24 showed the Beer Party polling at 8 percent—level with the Greens and NEOS. The far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) retained its lead on 30 percent, followed by the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) on 22 percent and conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) on 21 percent.
Divided Austria (3)
56 percent of Austrians support instituting a de facto ban on asylum applications. That support is driven above all by FPÖ voters, 87 percent of whom support an ‘upper limit’ of zero asylum applications per year, though the idea is also backed by 58 percent of ÖVP voters and 45 percent of SPÖ voters.
From the moment I saw a case worker through to receiving my new permit, the process went smoothly, by contrast.
Maybe I'm the only person whose naturalisation went through with minimal hitches. The six month wait from April 2017 to October 2017 was a minor inconvenience, but I found the process a stroll - without legal assistance, even with complicating factors (proving son hadn't taken Russian citizenship, having to petition the Home Office to allow him to renounce his British citizenship as minor to prove that it was not possible, and getting the process through before my wife gave birth to twins while she was stateless...)
When I interpreted for and accompanied Article 50 applicants in 2021, I found the staff co-operative. In one case though I did have to summon every ounce of knowledge to negotiate an applicant in a tricky position through getting a ten year card. But then again, I effectively conducted a mystery shopping exercise against them over the course of the year, including pointing out overcharging on the opening morning of Art 50 card applications.