You have received your university admission or your job offer from Germany. Amazing. Finally you will move to this amazing country and build you future here. First you have to apply for visa at the embassy in your country. There already you get into the examination of your resilience through german bureaucracy. If you are lucky, you can find an appointment for quite an early date, but usually it is 3+ months of waiting until the appointment. My wife had to wait for 8 months to get her family reunion visum.
One day you receive the call or mail from the embassy to pick up your visum. Probably one of the best feelings ever. You feel so happy, go pick your visum up and plan your flight to Germany. Assuming you have a room to stay at, after you land and settle the next steps are awaiting you. To be honest, fun starts now. You have to register yourself at the city’s/district’s Einwohnermeldeamt. You must be registered in order to open a bank account, apply for the health insurance, or receive a tax identification number, for example. You will need to register within two weeks of taking up residence in an apartment. If you are in a big city, that can take around 1-2 months.
In parallel, you still need to transfer your visum into a residence permit. This process is owned and executed by the Ausländerbehörde. The process and waiting time varies again depending on the city/district you are living in. For example, in Stuttgart my colleagues have been waiting since half a year to get an appointment to apply for the residence permit. Their visum had expired, they received another temporary stay permit (not the same as residence permit), and they are still waiting for their appointment for the long-term permit.
I live near Ausländerbehörde in Stuttgart. Earlier there were a queue of 100s of people waiting from 5 a.m. on to be able to get in for clarifying their issue. Even if you have a small question to ask, you need to start waiting at 5 a.m. Why? Because there is no another way of getting an answer. Phone, e-mail, post, fax (yeah they still use that), none of them work practically.
Let me tell you the worst case scenario, based on true stories. You have been waiting for 8 months for them to process your application and give you a feedback. Within these 8 months you have written dozens of e-mails, you have done 100s of calling attempts, you have tried many times to go in person, but all of them unanswered and unsuccessful attempts. One day you receive an e-mail and they tell you that while they started to check your documents, they realized that there is no documents. They cannot find them. They only have your application paper, but not the folder with all of your data. They have simply lost it. They are sorry for it. Please start collecting all the required documents and re-submit. After 8 months of waiting (in the true story I implied it was 13+ months).
There are reasons why they are slow. There is probably a huge and continuously piling up backlog of cases. If the output is way smaller than the input, the bottleneck becomes even more stuffed. There is a lack of employees in the public institutions. And many more other smaller reasons and excuses. At the end, the experience of german bureaucracy nukes your dream life in Germany. So it does to mine. So it does to all of our lives.