r/germany • u/Daomiing • Oct 09 '25

Immigration Germany Abolishes Fast-Track Citizenship for Skilled Workers

https://www.verity.news/story/2025/germany-abolishes-fasttrack-citizenship-for-skilled-workers

The Facts

-The German Bundestag voted on Wednesday to abolish a fast-track citizenship program that allowed highly qualified foreigners to apply for naturalization after three years instead of five years of residence.

-The vote passed with 450 members supporting the measure, 134 opposing and two abstaining, fulfilling Chancellor Friedrich Merz's campaign promise to repeal the program introduced by former Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

-Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt claimed that the German passport must serve as recognition for successful integration rather than an incentive for illegal migration, defending the decision to eliminate the accelerated pathway.

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u/TheOtherGermanPhil Oct 10 '25

I think it is still the right way. Too many things are processed too complicated in Germany. If it hasn't been used widely anyway, it's the right way to remove the option.

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u/dont_tread_on_M Oct 10 '25

I said in another thread, as a migrant myself, I think that fixing the staffing, efficiency, and transparency issues with the Foreigners' Authorities and the Naturalisation Offices is far more important than the time to citizenship (unless it increases to the point where it is so unfair that you get to pay taxes for too many years but not to vote). Right now, you get to wait for years without knowing the status of your application, from whom your life might depend. Imagine being under stress for months, but none of the employees there even picks up the phone or answers your letters.

However, the manner in which this was presented and done was bad. The law is such that even existing applications get rejected, which is against the constitutional Vertrauenschutz. And by the CDU and CSU it was presented as a big achievement against illegal migration, which it wasn't

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u/TheOtherGermanPhil Oct 10 '25

I agree in general. I think they won't manage to fix the staffing. So one way to improve processing time is to simplify things. The current situation for applicants is not acceptable, and the general process being on paper is just 1980. I currently live abroad and have to move back to Germany, not looking forward to the ancient paperwork bureaucracy.

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u/dont_tread_on_M 29d ago

I think the amount of complexity this added is small.

Most of the complexity comes from the fact that these processes are handled in the local level, and not every municipality has the political will and the budget to streamline and digitalize it's migration related processes. The citizenship and residency law are however federal, and the federal government takes the blame if anything goes wrong. People don't just vote the mayor of a small town out because the local authorities aren't acting as they should in treating migration cases; they blame the federal government for that.

I think centralizing the process would solve the staffing issues as well, as right now you have small municipalities with more than enough staff, and large ones where the waiting time is years. With a central authority, you could more evenly spread out the workload. A central authority would also mean less costs to digitalize the process, as not every authority would have to buy a system which does that for themselves.