German bureaucracy in the integration of newcomers and how it can be reduced.

By international standards, Germany is a highly bureaucratized country. Even German-speaking natives regularly get lost in a forest of laws, regulations, and responsible administrative bodies. German civil servants are also known to be prone to intransigence, stubbornness, and hierarchical thinking patterns. Pragmatic solutions, compromise, accepting criticism, admitting mistakes, taking personal responsibility, and customer friendliness are not a natural part of the professional culture. Moreover, the experience with democracy and with responsible citizens standing up for their rights is still very young, certainly in the eastern parts of Germany. Representatives of the state and the bureaucracy therefore regularly risk coming into conflict with representatives of civil society and individual citizens. Not infrequently, the latter are perceived as the “enemy” who wants to undermine the authority of the official and ultimately the state. This, of course, should be dealt with firmly, which only reinforces the antagonism. Trust in democracy is thus further undermined.

Refugees usually come from much less bureaucratized countries and are less used to dealing with bureaucracy. Moreover, they do not speak the language, certainly not the language of German bureaucrats.

Refugees who arrive in Germany and then try to integrate face a great complexity of institutions. On the public side, these include the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, the Foreigners’ Office, the Social Welfare Office, the Registry Office, the Accommodation Authority, the Employment Agency, the Job Center, the Housing Office, schools and daycare centers. Activities on the private and semi-public side include language course providers, education providers, migration counseling, and voluntary associations for integration. Refugees and migrants are expected to find their way through this labyrinth mostly on their own.

Refugees living in transitional homes often have an advantage over those who have their own apartment, as they can more or less fall back on the social workers present when they receive letters and documents from the above-mentioned offices and institutions or when they want to submit applications for studies, work, or housing, among other things. A large part of the working time of these social workers is therefore filled with bureaucracy and translating official letters for the residents, which are usually written in rather incomprehensible German. Some social workers are more skilled or motivated than others for this bureaucratic work, which reinforces the unequal treatment of residents of different refugee shelters.

Those who live independently receive less direct support in their struggle with bureaucracy and rely mainly on volunteers and migration counseling from civil society organizations such as Diakonie or Arbeiterwohlfahrt. In addition, they are confronted with other actors: Landlords, tax authorities, providers of gas, electricity, water, Internet and telephone connections, garbage collection, public broadcasters who charge broadcasting fees, banks, insurance companies, stores where people can purchase on credit or installment payments, and of course possible employers with their payrolls. There is little or no information about the people who have left the transitional refugee homes. However, the volunteers, integration officers and employees of migration counseling centers with whom we spoke over the years had the impression that many are lost in this complexity.

Frustration with bureaucracy is high among refugees. First of all, the inertia and opacity with which the institutions involved usually operate is hard to bear. In all interviews we conducted with newcomers since 2022, the word “waiting” was used most often (Blokland 2024: 271ff). This slowness and the added unpredictability and uncertainty give the processes a Kafkaesque character and literally make people sick.

Second, there is a lot of lack of understanding about the decisions that these processes produce. People don’t understand these decisions because they don’t understand the underlying rationality, which in principle could be remedied; or they don’t understand them because they perceive the underlying rationality as irrational, arbitrary, unjust, or inhumane. As a result, many experience the decision-making process as a lottery. Participating in lotteries can give people satisfaction, but usually not when their very existence is at stake.

Third, and related, migrants regularly feel discriminated against. They have the impression that people with seemingly identical backgrounds who deal with other counties or states in Germany are treated differently. There are different political cultures in different parts of Germany, which leads to different rules and regulations being formulated or the same rules and regulations being interpreted differently. However, the refugees did not choose to live in Teltow-Fläming, Vorpommern-Greifswald or Wolfsburg, this decision was taken from them. So, while the bureaucracy is supposed to ensure that the same laws and regulations apply everywhere, and thus the same cases are treated the same way, in practice this is not always the case.

Fourth, people regularly felt that they were treated unfairly and disrespectfully by officials. Several refugees reported that they could not sleep in the days leading up to an appointment with immigration authorities, and not just because there was a lot at stake. They feared that officials would act in an insensitive, condescending, rude, and even crude manner. The refugees’ stories were confirmed by numerous actors who were in possession of valid passports.

Fifth, and perhaps needless to say, people felt overwhelmed by the bleakness, volume, and complexity of the bureaucracy. Regularly, the rationale behind it is not understood and there is even a suspicion that the refugees’ participation in social life is to be deliberately prevented.

Experiences of social workers, volunteers and other stakeholders with bureaucracy

Social workers, shelter managers, volunteers, and other stakeholders we interviewed in the last couple of years could hardly stop talking about the occasionally bizarre bureaucratic practices of officials who behind their computer screens sometimes seem to have lost all touch with reality. These practices cost a great deal of time, energy, money, and job satisfaction and, according to many of those involved, serve little or no purpose. However, because people are in a relationship of dependency, they are afraid to protest.

Almost all social workers and home managers complained about the bureaucratic overload, which meant that people hardly got to do the social work they were actually trained to do (Blokland 2024: 321ff). Almost everyone involved felt that the system had stalled and could not be restarted without structural changes. To protect themselves, resignation and indifference had set in. Structural changes were deemed necessary in asylum, migration, and labor law, in the existing bureaucratic structures and their human resources, and in the assignment of refugee accommodations and the funds available for them.

Almost everyone agreed that the institutions they work with were also completely overwhelmed. It was felt that these services are structurally understaffed, lack the necessary expertise, are stuck in bureaucracy and regularly seem to have no idea about the reality in the refugee accommodations and the living environment of the refugees. The lack of understanding that regularly arises among the refugees about decisions or the lack thereof must be absorbed by the social workers, which adds to the burden. For many refugees, the shelter manager is the boss who represents the German state, and all the bureaucratic institutions subordinate to it. If the state fails, the boss gets the bill.

What could be done?

In principle, bureaucracy is a highly democratic and efficient instrument for coordinating and controlling actions. In a well-functioning bureaucracy, as justice requires, equal cases are treated equally and unequal cases are treated unequally, based on a predetermined, clear, verifiable, predictable, generally applicable, coherent, and consistent system of laws and rules (see Blokland 2006). Therefore, democracy, in which all citizens should be treated equally, generally promotes bureaucracy.

There is another reason why bureaucracies tend to expand. A bureaucracy is internally organized in a rational, consistent, and coherent manner, and therefore can deal poorly with an irrational and unpredictable environment. It therefore tries to control this environment by imposing on it the same (functional) rationality by which it is itself driven. All conceivable cases that the civil servant might face should fall into a predetermined, rationally grounded category. Hence, bureaucracy functions best in a relatively homogeneous, clear, and stable environment. However, if diversity and complexity increase too rapidly (as for instance is the case when rather suddenly large numbers of refugees with very different backgrounds cross the border), there is a danger that the bureaucracy will become mired in rigidity. There are then too many new cases for which no categories with specific rules and regulations have previously been devised. As already analyzed in detail by Max Weber (1922), in ideal-typical bureaucracies, officials at the lower end of the administrative hierarchy are expected in such cases to submit their problem to a higher official in the hierarchy. And they do so just until a level is reached at which the necessary political or substantive decisions can be made about this new case. But if there are too many changes in the environment, the information channels can quickly become clogged. And when policymakers fail to make clear decisions, cases are endlessly put on the back burner. Officials simply don’t know what to do. Indisputable refugees from Chechnya, Afghanistan or Palestine then suddenly find themselves in a “transitional home” for a decade. Migrant workers who could make an important contribution to overcoming the looming demographic catastrophe in Germany and Brandenburg are then forced to sit idle for years.

The solutions lie primarily in political leaders making the substantive or substantive-rational decisions about laws and regulations that are necessary for the bureaucracy to function. For example, German policymakers have refused for years to acknowledge that Afghanistan is an unsafe country. This would have implied admitting that the German army, the Bundeswehr, together with its international partners, could not provide stability and security in Afghanistan. Outside of national politics, however, almost everyone was familiar with this reality. As a result, Afghan refugees were not granted asylum on the basis of national political rules, on the one hand, and were generally not deported from the country on the basis of local realism, on the other. Hence, they were tolerated but generally not allowed to study, work, live on their own, and integrate. We saw before that the largest group of refugees in the transitional homes in Teltow-Fläming in spring 2022 consisted of Afghans (20 percent of the population). More than half had been here for more than three years (Blokland 2024: 311ff). Almost half were still in the asylum process – even six months after the Taliban had finally taken over the country. Had policymakers made the fundamental decision earlier that Afghanistan was not safe, it would have significantly reduced the burden on refugee shelters and the institutions that review asylum applications. The same observation can be made for other large refugee groups, think Chechens (14%) and Iranians (9%).

Second, it is not helpful to address the ever-increasing complexity only by creating more and more rules, regulations, or categories. Instead of condensing laws and regulations and strengthening the hierarchy, officials at the bottom of the pyramid could be given more policy discretion. They are often better informed about a client’s specific circumstances, which can rarely be fully captured by general rules, and can better accommodate those circumstances in their decision-making. For most German bureaucrats, if not German citizens, this is hard to understand, but decentralization, pragmatism, flexibility, and tailoring are also responses to congestion. 

One danger of lower-level officials having greater policy discretion is that equal treatment of equal cases is less assured. Still, their greater knowledge of the specific context allows them to better judge when cases are truly equal, and the same rules should be applied. If the cases are unequal, they should also be treated unequally. It should simply be acknowledged that there is also no equality before the law in the current situation: Equal treatment of refugees with similar backgrounds is affected by numerous variables, as we demonstrated in Migrationspolitik auf der Flucht (2024). Consider the shelter they happen to be housed in, the social workers and volunteers who happen to work there, the municipality in which they happen to reside and the efforts that happen to be made on behalf of refugees in that municipality, the county in which they happen to reside and the officials who happen to work in services such as the Foreigners’ Registration Office and the Social Welfare Office, and the state to which they happen to be assigned upon arrival and in which there happens to be a specific administrative culture. Acknowledging these coincidences can make one less fearful of the policy discretion of individual civil servants trying to address the specific context and complexity of an individual case, making the bureaucracy less cold and more human, as well as more decisive and efficient.

Third, for a better functioning bureaucracy, one can also intentionally employ other personality types. Bureaucracies are structured, predictable, and hierarchical, and therefore attract employees with personalities and disciplines that fit well with these characteristics. This contributes to the rigidity, inflexibility, and also insensitivity to the specific context of each case to which bureaucracies are already inherently prone. The great German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1940: 321ff) therefore recommended already almost a century ago that bureaucracies should deliberately recruit other kinds of personalities with different disciplinary backgrounds to counteract the existing tendencies toward insensitivity to human dimensions and needs.

Again, the impersonal bureaucracy often provides a well-chosen answer to inefficiency, arbitrariness, patronage, nepotism, and individual misuse of power. Nonetheless, there are possibilities for limiting the extent of detachment in bureaucracies. This is shown, according to Mannheim, by the client-friendly character often seen in corporate bureaucracies, as well as by the rise in the twentieth century of the social worker. On the one hand, this is an old-fashioned bureaucrat who performs administrative tasks, but on the other hand he or she provides the help and stay of clients, and who puts a new organized form of charity into practice. The modern social worker “adds a touch of emotion and vitality to ordinary intercourse without becoming personally committed or attached” (1940: 324). To the opinion of Mannheim, the arrival of the social worker proves how other mentalities can be incorporated in a bureaucratic organization. He proposes various ways to promote this, one of which is to combine the functions that are now performed by several individuals in the job of a single person.[1] In addition, he advocates recruiting and training more individuals who are capable of combining a personal involvement with a professional objectivity and who, apart from this, “will do only work which has a purpose” (1940: 324).

Fourth, to counter insensitivity and detachment civil servants and politicians might also consider making trips to transitional housing facilities to learn about the living conditions of the people they are deciding on, and the working conditions of the social workers assigned there. This applies from the top down. In this way, a sense of reality, of circumstances, and of urgency can be fostered.

Fifth, the bureaucracy in many districts and states in Germany is simply understaffed and inadequately equipped. The quality of bureaucracies and their employees varies from district to district, state to state, and country to country. Nevertheless, there is also a general negative trend in many Western democracies. This can be explained in part by the anti-government sentiment that has spread since the 1980s. As a result, the status of workers and salaries in this sector have declined compared to those in the market sector. In the long run, this leads almost everywhere to a shortage of personnel and a decline in their motivations and qualifications. Also, in the German bureaucracy responsible for integration, there are generally too few employees and too few employees with the appropriate qualifications. Complaints about the inaccessibility and lack of competence of the offices involved are numerous. This is another reason why cases are endlessly delayed, deadlines are not met, and more and more work accumulates in the long run. When cases are not processed in a timely manner, enormous societal costs are incurred. To reduce these long-term costs, it makes sense to invest in people in the short term.

Conclusion

Bureaucracy is one of the biggest obstacles to successful integration in Germany. Its complexity, inflexibility, and overload not only lead to frustration and demotivation, but also to social and personal problems. Systemic inertia affects people who are already under considerable strain—often with dramatic consequences.

To counteract this, structural reforms are needed: political clarity in fundamental decisions, more leeway for local employees, a more humane administrative culture, and sufficient staff with appropriate qualifications. Personal contact between decision-makers and the lives of those affected should also be intensified. Only through a pragmatic, flexible, and empathetic bureaucracy can integration be prevented from being hindered or even made impossible by institutional hurdles.

Literature

Blokland, Hans. 2006. Modernization and its Political Consequences. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Blokland, Hans. 2024. Migrationspolitik auf der Flucht. Erfahrungen von Neuankömmlingen mit Untätigkeit, Trägheit und Gleichgültigkeit. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Blokland, Hans. 2025. Die schleppende Integration von Neuankömmlingen: Kann künstliche Intelligenz helfen? Potsdam: Social Science Works.

Mannheim, Karl. 1940. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. London: Routledge.

Weber, Max. 1922. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr.

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Footnote

[1] In addition, one can bring officers together to solve the various problems facing a client in their context. Normally these problems (employment, housing, schooling, asylum procedure, et cetera) are addressed by different officers in accordance with their carefully delineated bureaucratic powers. Because problems are interrelated, this is not always productive (see Blokland 2024: §18.1).