I used to do a fair amount of travel in Europe and depending on where you were going depended on how you were received. Well, this was due to the shengen agreement which allows for the gradual abolition of border checks within the EU.
The convenient part is when landing in a foreign country from another EU country you were simply waved through the booths where the passport checks were normally performed.
It was on one of these trips that the line was stopped for unknown reasons and we all stood around with not too much to do. Eventually I was bored enough to grab my passport and rifle through the pages and eventually found myself looking at the page with my aufenthalterlaubnis (working permit) only to discover that it expired nine months ago.
The passport hadn’t expired but I suspected that somewhere in Germany there was a government office that wouldn’t be very happy at this revelation. So anyway, I was at the project and my work weeks were only four days long. I decided to use my free day to go to the local government office, but my goal was not to shout out that my papers are expired but rather to find out where is the auslanderamt (foreigner office) is located so I can get this problem fixed.
Ok, ok, little to my knowledge the new local government office supported more services since my last visit so the woman at the desk simply took my passport out of my hand. I don’t think that she was especially angry with me but that didn’t stop her from yelling at me and informing me that with these papers expired all she had to do was to get the police to ship me out of the country.
Well, after being yelled at for a while I made a call to our human resources gal. She was a nice lady who keeps the company papers in order, well, usually. She spoke to the government office worker for a while and promised that she would get my papers corrected next week. The next week I went downtown and got my papers extended for another 90 days. Why so short? Well, it seems that if I had not let my papers lapse I could have now had unbeschranked aufenhaltserlaubnis papers (unlimited living/working papers).
I am sure that I am random statistic and that a large international financial company couldn’t possibly get it that wrong all the time right? Well, I don’t know all people who worked for my company but I do know of another similar encounter.
It turned out that the government people did realize that Paul’s papers were expired and this needed to be addressed. From what I heard, our human resources group was indeed working on it when some rather overzealous boarder enforcement decided to get to work.
Paul was doing a few things in his apartment Saturday morning when the doorbell rang. It seems that two nice policemen were there to bring him to the airport so he could be deported.
Indeed his papers were not in order but both the government and our human resources group knew this. The problem was supposed to be corrected the following week. I wasn’t there but I heard that after a considerable amount of time and some phone calls the police decided to not deport him on the spot. To keep good control of the situation they took Paul’s passport with them. He wouldn’t be getting it back, it would have to be retrieved by our human resources woman in person.