What If You Just Don't Know?

I'm one of those people who went through the various stages and eventually got a residence visa for Germany.

If you were to ask the basic steps?  Well, there are basically three steps.

1.  You fill out the 15-odd page form and give them around forty bits of information about yourself and why you need the residence visa.  I'm not an asylum-guy, or a migrant in search of work....I'm merely married to a German and in some retirement phase of life.  The facts on the form?  All facts.  They could have spent six months reviewing it and finding not a single fact questionable or misleading.

2.  You need to show some history (like a resume).  If you said you were from Venezuela, then the evidence ought to be in the package.

3.  You need a legit ID.

A medical exam?  No.  None.

A mental exam?  No. None.

A eight-hour presentation explaining murder is illegal in Germany, as is the sales of hard drugs?  No. Nothing.  There is an attempt to talk about Constitutional rights, but they don't go down into domestic violence or simply bad behavior.

The German-built machine simply assumes that you know something about good behavior and respect.  It puts all incoming individuals at the same level.  I've come across a lot of non-Germans who have respect and go as far as possible on the good behavior scale. My gut feeling is that more than 90-percent of those with visas....are trying to be good guests.  The rest?  Less so.

The problem here is that you don't typically go out (as a host) and brief everyone entering the party about good manners and charm.  There's simply a lot of hope that everyone will turn into a good guest upon arrival.  One might laugh about that idea, but that's the situation that has developed in the past five years.