"Reform completed"

Vienna’s immigration authority is now stepping up the pace

MA-35 Director Georg Hufgard-Leitner and Deputy Mayor Christoph Wiederkehr take stock of the reform

(Bild: Zwefo)

The city is satisfied with the reform of MA 35. The goals that were set three years ago in view of the catastrophic situation at the time have even been significantly exceeded. One sore point at the city's Aliens Department, however, remains the long waiting times for naturalization.

Deputy Mayor Integration Councillor Christoph Wiederkehr also makes no secret of this: "324 days - that's too long." On average, it currently takes 324 days to submit an application for naturalization to MA 35, not even counting the duration of the procedure. The city is only partly responsible for this.

7356 naturalization procedures
Citizenship applications from descendants of victims of Nazi persecution, for example, are processed centrally via Vienna. They currently account for around 40 percent of all procedures - 7,356 last year. In addition, citizenship procedures are legally demanding. Depending on the individual case, a wide variety of documents need to be translated, notarized and more: this takes time and ties up the processing officials for a long time.

Desire for naturalization usually fails due to income
"The need for naturalization has risen sharply," said Wiederkehr on the rush to the authorities and attributed this to a greater need for security, especially in light of the war in Ukraine. Half of all applications are rejected, in almost all cases due to insufficient income. After all, you can only get citizenship if you can prove, for example, as an adult individual, that you have around 1,200 euros left over per month after deducting all fixed costs.

How long MA-35 procedures take

• Residence procedures for EU and EEA citizens now take an average of 12.9 days in Vienna. Three years ago it was still 41.3 days.
• Residence procedures for citizens of other countries take an average of 87.1 days at MA 35 instead of 105.7 days previously.
• Procedures for the extension of non-EEA residence permits are now processed in 46 days instead of 69.8.
• The average duration of all procedures at MA 35, from residence to citizenship, has fallen from 68.8 days to 41.1 days.

Reform targets exceeded
Compared to three years ago, however, the MA 35 has made significant progress in "everyday life" in terms of immigration law (see box above): three years ago, the aim was to speed up procedures by 25 percent, but this has now even increased to 40 percent, of course also due to an increase in staff from 550 to 800 over the past three years.

Head of the authority Georg Hufgard-Leitner considers the reform process at his authority to be largely complete. From now on, it is more about "improvement" than reform. The next improvement planned for naturalizations is an increase of 300 more application dates per year than before, but only from September 2025 - when the applications that are now being submitted will be processed.