German visa bottlenecks ‘deterring international students’

Germany has continued to attract international students despite the pandemic, but demand has its immigration system creaking so badly that some are turning elsewhere, it has been claimed.

High volumes of visa applications are placing a strain on German embassies and consulates worldwide, some of which have been forced to outsource administration to private providers.

A spokesperson for the German Foreign Ministry said some student visa applicants should expect to wait “several months” to apply, with processing then taking up to 10 weeks.

“High demand currently exceeds our capacity in some locations even after we have taken extensive measures to accelerate processing,” the spokesperson said.

The number of international students rose 1.5 per cent in the winter of 2020-21, even in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, to 324,729, according to the latest data from the German Academic Exchange Service.

Kumar Ashish, chairman of the Federal Union of International Students in Germany, said delays meant that some would be late to start their studies while others had abandoned Germany as a destination altogether.

“Lots of students have dropped an idea to come to Germany and applied to go to the US, the UK or Australia, because of the bureaucratic problems,” he said. “For them, losing this one year only to wait for the visa appointment doesn’t make sense. They apply in parallel, and whichever goes faster they travel to those countries.”

The ministry spokesperson said that the lifting of Covid-19 travel restrictions had created “large catch-up effects in terms of visa demand overall”. However, embassies and consulates had been instructed to prioritise student visa applications before the start of the winter semester on 1 October, they explained.

Herbert Grieshop, director of international affairs at the Free University of Berlin, said he was expecting a higher number of complaints from international students as the start of the semester loomed. Visa waiting times had shot up in some countries because of lockdowns, he said, with those in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh already high before the pandemic.

A spokeswoman for Karlsruhe Institute of Technology said it had cases of students from Iran, India and African countries struggling to get visas. “We truly hope that the impact of the pandemic will lessen,” she said.

The ministry said that it had outsourced applications, changed visa workflows and hired more staff to try to handle demand, but Mr Ashish said this was causing additional problems and he claimed that applicants were being charged €1,000 (£864) to secure appointment slots.

A spokesperson for VFS Global, a firm brought in to handle applications for German embassies and consulates in India, said it did not charge anything beyond the €75 fee required by the embassy and distributed appointments on a “first-come, first-served basis”.

But, the spokesperson warned, there might be “fraudulent third parties” operating who prey on applicants and charge fees for scheduling appointments.

Mr Ashish said Uni-Assist, an association set up by 150 German higher education institutions to process international applications, was understaffed and was acting as another bottleneck.

Martin Knechtges, the association’s policy and procedure development officer, said he was aware that some of the 250,000 applications it processed had been delayed, but that its time per application had not increased overall.

“Because of other factors like Covid, an unexpected rise of applications and other effects, we had two seasons in the last 10 when we couldn’t finish all applications in the given time,” he said, citing a 2020 labour dispute and struggles to recruit expert staff in Berlin to cope with processing peaks from May to August.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com