Race Data Embarrassment

Immigration and naturalization authorities in the city-state of Berlin have egg on their faces after the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet and the German online edition of the news magazine Der Spiegel reported that a form misleadingly seemed to ask would-be citizens about their race.

The form in question -- the IC 228 Declaration for Citizenship Application -- contains the clause: "I hereby grant my express permission ... for the processing ... of personal data in special categories, in this case concerning racial and ethnic origin."

It's an unfortunate choice of words given Germany's past -- and one that was brought to the attention of the Berlin city government by Green party parliamentarian Özcan Mutlu.

"Is membership in a certain race a relevant criterion for citizenship?" Mutlu asked.

Berlin naturalization authorities responded that the wording came from an EU directive. Technically, that's true, and there's no reason to think that civil servants were deciding whether or not to grant citizenship on the basis of race.

But this incident does illustrate the penchant among bureaucrats to formulate and enforce regulations without questioning their purpose or implications.

The letter over the spirit

The EU legislation states "member states shall prohibit the processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin" and then proceeds to list a number of exceptions -- none of which directly concerns citizenship applications.

The use of the term rassisch, a word heavy with Nazi overtones, for "racial" in the German version of the EU directive is an example of how literal translations are often misleading. But why did Berlin's naturalization authorities feel the need to adopt it in the first place? And how did a directive mainly aimed at restricting state authority get transmuted into a citizenship requirement?

The Berlin authorities seem to have been trying to indemnify themselves against charges of violating EU law in case they happened to collect data that revealed ethnicity. Yet in so doing, they turned the spirit of the EU legislation on its head and put their own interests before those of the people they are supposed to be serving.

As the authors of the Spiegel article point out, officials in other German states -- for example in North Rhine-Westphalia -- don't require a form with corresponding language. The article also cites an unnamed Berlin employee at the naturalization authority as saying he doesn't see a problem since no one previously complained.

But not seeing the problem is the problem. Garbled forms get processed without civil servants questioning whether they make any sense. And in the case of the IC 228, by inventing yet another piece of paper for applicants to grapple with, the civil servants created an embarrassing gaffe for themselves.

Paperwork purgatory

As anyone who's ever had the pleasure can attest, a visit to the Berlin immigration and naturalization authority is like a preview of purgatory. People needing documents fritter away hours in cramped waiting rooms, only to find, when it is their turn to speak to a civil servant, that they're missing this or that piece of previously unspecified paperwork. The frustration is doubled when the suspicion arises that civil servants themselves don't even know what the various forms actually say.

Fortunately, the unpleasantness isn't racist. Germans are treated in much the same fashion when they have to renew their passports or identity cards. But surely a country like Germany that says it wants greater immigration should be doing more to eradicate arcane and sometimes asinine bureaucratic formalities.

In the case of the IC 228, there could be a happy end. According to the Spiegel article, the wording is to be reviewed and will probably be changed -- once Berlin's Senator for Internal Affairs gets back from a winter vacation.

Jefferson Chase works as a journalist at DW-WORLD.DE and DW-TV as well as being a long-time American resident of Berlin.