Over the past two weeks, there's been a fair amount of talk in Germany over scandal with BamF (the agency that does immigration approval or disapproval). The Bremen office got into the original trouble, but there's talk now of a national audit and more bad episodes to be put out in public view.
The talk of bribes? It continues but you get the impression that the interpreter crowd (hired immigrants themselves) were mostly the ones who got into bribes. You don't hear much of the BamF German employees getting bribes (least not yet).
So this is what I think came to occur.
1. The 700-man agency (BamF) that existed in 2012...had existed for decades with a simple practice. You (the immigrant) walked into a consulate or embassy, talked to the German folks, and filled out the application form while in your home-country. You presented an ID. The folks at the embassy did a basic background check and confirmed you weren't nuts or a prison-releasee. What they sent onto BamF in Nuremberg was a package that had probably one-third of the stress work done.
2. After 2013 started up and a whole lot of folks were walking into Germany....BamF had a mess on their hands. They didn't have the manpower to do all the ID checks, the background checks, and 'foot-work'. They got behind, and I suspect that if you talked to the older employees....by mid-summer of 2014, they were taking six months to do something that used to take six weeks.
3. Rather than admit 'defeat' or whatever you'd call this slowed-down process.....they continued on. Bringing in new employees? It would be exactly what an American firm or organization would do. They didn't want to do it because it'd take months to train more people. By summer of 2014, they should have been adding a hundred people every month, and hiring up retired personnel to be trainers.
4. By 2015 in the spring....the numbers were inflating again. I suspect that they (BamF) reached a point where they were just approving folks with minimum review....just to get the numbers down and appear that bad in terms of length of time for approval. It wouldn't surprise me if they were fumbling around and approving five people out of ten....with no real effort. An audit to catch this screwed-up method? Non-existent.
5. By spring of 2016, they at their deepest point, and finally bringing on more people. Some folks were taking a full year for the approval/disapproval process. Part of the problem centered on so many people not having a valid ID, and giving suspect information (all part of the process that never occurred in 2012 or prior).
6. People at the top who should have observed all of this? Merkel and her ministers? No. The head of BamF back in 2013 to 2015? I doubt if he understood the complex way his organization functioned and the helpful way that the application back in the home-country (with the ID) helped to avoid hassle and extra hours. Even when this guy got 'dumped' (they basically told him to retire)....the new guy came in....got more employees involved, and tried to fix a couple of things. But I doubt if he understood the whole complex way of visa approval. It's a process, and you can make this simple or complex.
Yes, BamF finally got caught. Now, the penalty? Someone will have to go back....ID all of the faulty approval episodes, and re-examine folks....perhaps telling some guy that he shouldn't have been approved, and thus get a judge involved with a bigger mess in the end. You might actually see 10,000 people who are thinking they are squared away.....who will be told to pack and leave.
I said this in 2015....that the process used for all of this....from sheltering, to the handling business....was all screwed up and that it'd eventually come back to be a major mess that the public could not handle. Well....we've arrived at that point, I think.
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