Immigration and Visa Assistance

This chapter helps you decide whether you actually need to pay someone for immigration and visa assistance in Germany, and if you do, how to find the right person and what it will cost. It is written for the moment when something has gone wrong or is about to: a permit application that has been refused, an Ausländerbehörde that has stopped answering, a deadline printed on a letter you cannot fully read.

It does not explain German immigration law. That is a large field with its own chapters in this guide, and they are linked where they belong. What this chapter covers is the market for help: who is allowed to advise you, who only claims to be, where the free and state-funded advice sits, and how German lawyers’ fees are calculated in a case that has no money value attached to it.

The most useful thing to know before you spend anything is that the paid route is often not the right first step. Germany funds a professional migration advice service that is free to use, staffed by trained counsellors, and legally permitted to advise you. Most foreign residents have never heard of it, hire a lawyer or a consultant instead, and pay for something they could have had for nothing. So this chapter starts there, and only then turns to the situations where a lawyer is genuinely worth the money.

Where immigration and visa assistance is free and state-funded

The service is called the Migrationsberatung für erwachsene Zugewanderte, migration counselling for adult immigrants, universally shortened to MBE. It is funded by the Bundesministerium des Innern, the federal interior ministry, administered by the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF), the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, and delivered locally by welfare organisations. The BAMF states its price in one sentence: “Die Migrationsberatung für erwachsene Zuwanderer ist für Sie jederzeit kostenlos.” It is free for you at all times.

Its statutory anchor is Section 45 Satz 1 of the Aufenthaltsgesetz (AufenthG), the Residence Act, which says the Integrationskurs, the integration course, should be supplemented by further offers from the federal government and the Länder, in particular socio-pedagogical and migration-specific counselling. The section itself does not set the service up. It is the hook. The MBE is actually constituted by a BMI Förderrichtlinie, a funding guideline, which names Section 45 Satz 1 AufenthG as its legal basis and then sets out who may use the service and what it does. That distinction matters because you will see the MBE cited as though the statute created it, and the details you need are in the guideline, not in the statute.

The counselling is delivered by the Spitzenverbände der freien Wohlfahrtspflege, the national welfare associations. The guideline names them: Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO), the Deutscher Caritasverband, Diakonie Deutschland, the Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband, the Deutsches Rotes Kreuz (German Red Cross), and the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland (ZWST), together with the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV). In practice this means there is an MBE counselling office in almost every German town of any size, usually inside a Caritas or Diakonie building, and you do not need to care which organisation runs it. You do not have to share their religion. You do not have to be a member of anything.

Who may use the MBE, and for how long

The guideline sets the age line at 28. The MBE is aimed at adult immigrants from the age of 28 onwards. For people up to and including the age of 27, responsibility sits with a different ministry and a different service: the Jugendmigrationsdienste (JMD), the youth migration services, funded by the Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend. The JMD is also free. If you are 24 and have a residence problem, the JMD is your service, not the MBE. There is a national directory at jugendmigrationsdienste.de.

The age line is not absolute. The same guideline says that immigrants up to the completed 27th year may use the MBE where their life situation shows a counselling need that typically corresponds to that of an adult immigrant. So a 26-year-old with a family, a job and an Ausländerbehörde problem is not going to be turned away on a technicality. Ask, and let the counsellor decide.

The time window is the part people misread. The guideline makes the MBE available for up to three years after entering Germany, or up to three years after obtaining your first Aufenthaltstitel, the residence title. Those are alternatives, not the same date, and the second one is frequently the later. Someone who arrived on a Schengen visa, then a job-seeker stay, then finally received a residence permit two years in, has three years running from the permit, not from the airport. Beyond that, the guideline expressly keeps the door open: where there is a justified need for nachholende Integration, catch-up integration, the MBE is also open to people who have already been living in Germany longer but show an integration need comparable to a newcomer’s, with insufficient German named as the main indicator. If you have been here six years and your German is still weak and your paperwork is a mess, you are not obviously outside the scheme. Ask.

The guideline’s list of target groups is introduced with the word “insbesondere”, in particular, which in German legal drafting signals an open list rather than a closed gate. It names Spätaussiedler and their families, foreigners entitled or obliged to attend an Integrationskurs under Sections 44 and 44a AufenthG, and holders of qualifications staying in Germany to look for work under Section 20 AufenthG, along with their spouses and children. That covers most third-country nationals who arrive to work, to study, to join family or to seek protection. It is not a promise that every single person qualifies, and the counselling office decides its own cases. But the correct assumption is that you probably do qualify, not that you probably do not.

Why the MBE is allowed to advise you at all

This is worth a moment, because it is the same rule that will disqualify the paid consultant later in this chapter. Germany treats legal advice as a regulated activity under the Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz (RDG), the Legal Services Act. Section 2(1) RDG defines a Rechtsdienstleistung, a legal service, as any activity in a concrete matter belonging to someone else, as soon as it requires a legal assessment of the individual case. Section 3 RDG then says the independent provision of out-of-court legal services is impermissible unless a listed provision allows it.

Section 8(1) RDG is one of those provisions, and Nr. 5 names, word for word, the associations of the freie Wohlfahrtspflege within the meaning of Section 5 of the Sozialgesetzbuch XII and recognised bodies of the freie Jugendhilfe within the meaning of Section 75 SGB VIII, in each case within their own remit and area of responsibility. That is precisely the MBE and precisely the JMD. Their permission to advise you is not a grey area or a tolerated practice. It is written into the statute that restricts everyone else. Section 6(1) RDG separately permits legal services that are not connected with any paid activity, with Section 6(2) requiring, outside close personal relationships, that the advice be given by or under the guidance of someone qualified to give it professionally.

Read the qualifier in Section 8(1) again, though: “within their own remit and area of responsibility”. That is the boundary. It is why an MBE counsellor will read your letter, explain what the authority wants, help you assemble documents, telephone the Ausländerbehörde on your behalf and tell you frankly when your case has gone past what they can do. It is also why they will not run a Klage, a court action, for you. They are not Rechtsanwälte and they will not pretend to be.

What the free routes cannot do for you

An MBE counsellor cannot be your Prozessbevollmächtigter, your representative in court proceedings. They will not draft your Klageschrift. In a genuinely contested matter, where the authority has taken a position and is not moving, they will refer you onwards, and that referral is itself useful because they know which local lawyers actually take immigration work and which do not.

The other free channels have similar shapes. A Flüchtlingsrat, a refugee council, exists in every Bundesland and gives free advice, weighted towards asylum and protection status rather than work permits. Many cities employ an Ausländerbeauftragte or Integrationsbeauftragte, a commissioner for foreigners or integration, who sits inside the municipality and can sometimes unblock a file with an internal phone call that you could never make. Universities run their own international offices for student and researcher permits. None of these will litigate for you either, and none of them is a substitute for counsel when a deadline is running.

To find your nearest MBE office, the BAMF runs an official finder called BAMF-NAvI, which maps local integration and counselling services. The MBE also runs its own digital counselling service and app at mbeon.de, which lets you message a counsellor rather than travel to an office. Both are free.

The unregulated consultants, and why they are a real risk

Search for immigration help in Germany in English and you will find “visa consultants”, “relocation agents”, “immigration advisors” and “expat services”. Some are legitimate businesses doing legitimate work. Booking your Ausländerbehörde appointment, translating a document, collecting your certificates, driving you to the office and standing next to you: none of that is a Rechtsdienstleistung, and anyone may sell it.

The line is Section 2(1) RDG, and it is not blurry. The moment the service requires a legal assessment of your individual case, it is a Rechtsdienstleistung, and under Section 3 RDG it is impermissible unless the provider is permitted. Telling you which residence title you should apply for, given your qualification, your salary and your family situation, is a legal assessment of your individual case. Drafting your Widerspruch is a legal assessment of your individual case. Advising you on whether to accept a shorter permit or fight for a longer one is a legal assessment of your individual case. A consultant who is not a Rechtsanwalt and does not fall within one of the RDG’s exceptions may not do those things for money, however confident they sound and however good their website is.

The consequences land on you, not on them. A person operating outside the RDG carries no Berufshaftpflichtversicherung, the professional indemnity insurance that every admitted Rechtsanwalt must hold, so when their advice costs you your permit there is often nothing to claim against. They are not bound by professional confidentiality in the way an admitted lawyer is. They cannot represent you before the Verwaltungsgericht, the administrative court, so if the matter escalates you are starting again with a real lawyer who now has to fix a file someone else built. And an application that has been argued badly is harder to rescue than one that was never argued at all, because the authority already has your words on the record.

The check takes one minute and it is free. Every admitted lawyer in Germany appears in the Bundesweites Amtliches Anwaltsverzeichnis, the official national register maintained by the Rechtsanwaltskammern, the bar chambers, at rechtsanwaltsregister.org. If the person taking your money is not in it, they are not a Rechtsanwalt. No amount of branding changes that. Note also that an embassy’s list of local English-speaking lawyers is not a recommendation and never has been: missions publish those lists with an explicit disclaimer that they do not vouch for quality, and inclusion usually means the firm asked to be listed.

The credential that actually means something

The signal to look for is Fachanwalt für Migrationsrecht, specialist lawyer for migration law, or Fachanwältin in the feminine form. Unlike “specialising in immigration”, which anyone may print, this is a protected title awarded by a Rechtsanwaltskammer under the Fachanwaltsordnung (FAO), the specialist-lawyer regulation issued by the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer.

The requirements are specific enough to be worth knowing. Section 14p FAO defines the knowledge the candidate must demonstrate: nationality law including statelessness and naturalisation, residence law including visa procedures, the different residence titles and their conditions, expiry of residence rights, Ausweisung, enforcement of an obligation to leave including Duldung, deportation and detention pending deportation, European Union law including the residence rights of EU citizens and rights under ARB 1/80 of the EEC-Turkey association agreement, asylum law, and the social-law and criminal-law aspects of migration. Section 5 FAO requires 80 personally handled cases from those areas, of which at least 60 must come from at least two of the four core areas, and at least 30 must be court proceedings, of which at least 15 from the core areas. The title then has to be maintained with annual continuing education proved to the chamber unprompted.

A lawyer without the title may still be very good, and in some cities there is no Fachanwalt für Migrationsrecht within reach. But when you are choosing between strangers, in a language you may not command, a certified specialism is a fact you can verify rather than a claim you have to trust. Our chapter on legal services for expats explains the Fachanwalt system in full, along with the professional rules, the directories and how to run a first consultation. The Deutscher Anwaltverein runs a searchable directory at anwaltauskunft.de where you can filter by field and by language.

When a lawyer is genuinely warranted

Four situations justify paying, and in three of them paying quickly matters more than paying carefully.

The first is a refusal, an Ablehnung. Once an authority has said no in writing, the free services are largely out of their depth, a clock has started, and the shape of what you do next determines everything after it. The second is inaction: an application that has simply sat there for months while your life is on hold. There is a specific legal answer to that, described below, and it works. The third is an Ausweisung, an expulsion order ending your right to be here, or any deportation measure, where you should not be reading a guide, you should be calling a lawyer today. If the Ausweisung follows a criminal conviction, the criminal case and the residence case are entangled and each drives the other, which our chapter on criminal defense lawyers covers. The fourth is complex family reunification, particularly where documents from your home country are contested, a marriage is questioned, or a child’s status is unclear, because these turn into long evidential fights that no volunteer service can carry.

Outside those four, the honest answer is usually that you do not need a lawyer. A straightforward first application, an extension where nothing has changed, a change of employer within the same permit: these are MBE and Formularamt territory. Paying 800 euros to have someone fill in a form you could have filled in with a counsellor for nothing is not caution, it is just a cost.

The deadline that ends most cases before they start

German administrative law runs on a one-month clock. Under Section 70(1) of the Verwaltungsgerichtsordnung (VwGO), the Code of Administrative Court Procedure, a Widerspruch, a formal objection, must be filed within one month of the decision being notified to you, at the authority that issued it. Under Section 74(1) VwGO, an Anfechtungsklage, an action to annul a decision, must be filed within one month of service of the Widerspruchsbescheid, the decision on your objection, or where no Widerspruch procedure is required, within one month of the decision being notified. Section 74(2) applies the same period to the Verpflichtungsklage, the action to compel an authority to issue something it refused you.

Whether you file a Widerspruch at all is not a national question, and this catches people constantly. Section 68(1) VwGO makes the Vorverfahren, the preliminary objection procedure, the rule, but only “unless a statute provides otherwise” – and several Länder have used exactly that opening to abolish the Widerspruch in whole fields, including foreigners’ matters. So in one Bundesland you file a Widerspruch and in the next you go straight to court, and advice you read on a forum written by someone in a different state can be actively wrong. Section 83 AufenthG adds its own narrow exclusions on top: no Widerspruch against a refusal to suspend a deportation, and none against an entry and residence ban imposed by the BAMF. Refusals of a national visa or a passport substitute at the border are unappealable altogether, and the statute directs the person to apply to the competent mission abroad instead. That is a border rule and not a rule about ordinary embassy decisions.

You do not have to work any of this out yourself. Every German decision must carry a Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung, an instruction on remedies, telling you which remedy applies, where to file it, and how long you have. Find it, usually on the last page, and follow it. And there is a safety net worth knowing if you are already late: under Section 58(1) VwGO the period only begins to run if you were properly instructed in writing or electronically, and under Section 58(2) VwGO, if the instruction was missing or wrong, you get a year instead of a month. Do not plan around that. It is a rescue, not a strategy. But if you have missed a month, a lawyer’s first question will be whether the instruction was correct, and sometimes it was not.

Why a refused permit is an emergency and not a nuisance

This is the single most important paragraph in the chapter. As a general rule, Section 80(1) VwGO gives a Widerspruch and an Anfechtungsklage aufschiebende Wirkung, suspensive effect: filing the remedy freezes the decision. Section 84(1) Nr. 1 AufenthG takes that away for exactly the decision you are most likely to face. A Widerspruch and a Klage against the refusal of an application to grant or extend an Aufenthaltstitel have no suspensive effect. Filing does not freeze anything. Your objection can be pending and correct and your lawful residence can be running out underneath it.

The remedy is a separate application to the court under Section 80(5) VwGO, asking it to order the suspensive effect. Section 80(5) Satz 2 makes that application admissible even before the Klage itself is filed, which is exactly why speed matters: the interim application is often the whole case in practice, because it is what decides whether you are still here in three months. This is not something to attempt without counsel, and it is one of the clearest cases in German practice where a lawyer earns the fee.

There is one narrow protection you should know about, because it is about your job. Section 84(2) Satz 2 AufenthG says that for the purposes of taking up or continuing Erwerbstätigkeit, gainful employment, the residence title is deemed to continue while the period for filing the Widerspruch or Klage is still running, during court proceedings on an admissible application to order or restore suspensive effect, and for as long as a filed remedy has suspensive effect. In plain terms: a refusal does not automatically make you unemployable overnight, and your employer should be shown this provision rather than a rumour. It protects the work, not the residence, and it is not a substitute for the Section 80(5) application. Our chapter on an expat’s first steps in Germany explains the Fiktionsbescheinigung and the ordering problem that produces most of these situations.

When the Ausländerbehörde simply does nothing

Silence is the most common complaint foreign residents have, and there is a real answer to it that is badly under-used. Section 75 VwGO allows a Klage where no decision has been taken on a Widerspruch or on an application for an administrative act “without sufficient reason within a reasonable period”, in derogation from the normal requirement to complete the objection procedure first. This is the Untätigkeitsklage, the action for failure to act.

The timing is precise and often misquoted. The statute says the action cannot be brought before three months have passed since the Widerspruch was filed or since the application was made, unless special circumstances of the case require a shorter period. Three months is therefore the earliest date on which you may file, not a deadline by which you must. If a sufficient reason for the delay does exist, the court suspends the proceedings for a period it sets, and if the authority then decides within that period the matter is declared settled. In practice, that is frequently the outcome and it is a perfectly good one: a file that has been ignored for eight months acquires a decision remarkably quickly once a court asks the authority to explain itself. It is a genuinely effective instrument against a slow Ausländerbehörde, and it does not require the authority to have done anything wrong beyond not deciding.

If a German embassy refused your visa

Visa decisions taken by a German mission abroad follow a different path from decisions taken by a local Ausländerbehörde, and the difference is one most people get wrong. The last sentence of Section 52 Nr. 2 VwGO provides that for actions against the federal government in fields falling within the competence of Germany’s diplomatic and consular missions, and in visa matters also where they fall to the Bundesamt für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten, the competent court is the one in whose district the federal government has its seat. The federal government sits in Berlin. The Verwaltungsgericht Berlin therefore hears these cases, regardless of whether the embassy that refused you is in Delhi, Lagos or Bogota.

This has a practical consequence for hiring. A lawyer near the embassy is not useful; a lawyer who practises before the Verwaltungsgericht Berlin in visa matters is. That is a real and identifiable group of firms, and it is one of the few areas in German immigration practice where geography narrows your choice for you. The refusal letter itself will carry a Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung telling you what to do and by when; missions also commonly operate a Remonstration, an informal request for reconsideration, which is administrative practice rather than a VwGO remedy. Read the instruction on the letter and take advice before letting a reconsideration consume the time you have.

What immigration and visa assistance costs, and why the number is 5,000

German lawyers’ fees are set by statute, not by the lawyer, and they scale to the value of the matter rather than to hours worked. The mechanism is explained in full in our chapter on legal services for expats, including the Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz (RVG) fee tables, the Section 34 RVG cap on a first consultation for consumers, and when a lawyer may bill you by the hour instead. What that chapter cannot do is tell you the number that goes into the formula for an immigration case, because that number comes from a different statute.

Every matter has a Gegenstandswert, a value of the subject matter, which in court proceedings is the Streitwert. The fee table returns a fee unit for that value, and every fee in the case is a multiple of the unit. In a wage claim the value is the wages. In an immigration case there is usually no sum of money at all: what is the euro value of a residence permit? Section 52(1) of the Gerichtskostengesetz (GKG), the Court Fees Act, tells the administrative court to set the Streitwert at its discretion according to the significance of the matter as it appears from the claimant’s application. Section 52(2) GKG then supplies the fallback: where the facts and the dispute offer no sufficient basis for determining the value, a Streitwert of 5,000 euros is to be assumed.

That 5,000-euro Auffangwert, catch-all value, is why immigration matters have a fee level that is fairly predictable even though nothing is being claimed in money. It is the input, not the fee. Interim proceedings under Section 80(5) VwGO are commonly valued lower than the main action, and each instance is calculated separately. The right question to ask a firm is therefore not “what is your hourly rate” but “what Streitwert are you assuming, and what does the RVG produce at that value, including Umsatzsteuer”. Any competent immigration lawyer answers that in a sentence, because they do it every week. We are deliberately not printing a fee table here. The tables are amended periodically and a copied figure on a guide page goes stale while continuing to look authoritative.

Who pays if you win, and the trap in the objection stage

Loser-pays applies here, but the provision is not the one most guides cite. Immigration cases go to the administrative courts, where costs run under Section 154(1) VwGO: the unsuccessful party bears the costs of the proceedings. Section 91 of the Zivilprozessordnung, which our chapter on legal services explains, is the civil-court equivalent and governs different disputes. The practical effect is the same in outline: lose against the Ausländerbehörde and you carry the court fees and your own lawyer.

Section 162(1) VwGO defines the recoverable costs as the court fees plus the parties’ necessary expenses, expressly including the costs of the Vorverfahren, the objection stage. Section 162(2) Satz 1 makes a lawyer’s fees and disbursements always recoverable. Then comes the trap, in Section 162(2) Satz 2: where an objection procedure took place, the lawyer’s fees for that stage are recoverable only if the court declares that engaging a representative for the objection procedure was necessary. So you can win your case and still not recover what you paid your lawyer for the Widerspruch, unless the court makes that declaration. Ask your lawyer to apply for it. They know; clients almost never do.

If you cannot pay for any of this

You are not out of options, and your passport is not the question. Beratungshilfe, the state scheme that funds out-of-court legal advice for people who cannot afford it, covers immigration advice and does not turn on nationality. It is a means test administered by the Amtsgericht, the local court, and the residence-law matter you bring is German law with a domestic connection, which is what the scheme requires. Where the case reaches a court, Prozesskostenhilfe takes over, and Section 166(1) VwGO applies the Zivilprozessordnung’s rules on it in the administrative courts, which is the bridge that makes it available for your Klage.

Both schemes, the means tests, the application forms, the four-week trap that catches people who instruct a lawyer before applying, and the important limit that state aid does not cover the other side’s costs, are set out in our chapter on legal aid and pro bono services. That chapter also explains why the security-for-costs rule that applies to claimants habitually resident outside the EU and EEA is a civil-procedure provision, and how a grant of Prozesskostenhilfe removes it. If money is the reason you are hesitating, read that chapter before you conclude you cannot act.

The Ausländerbehörde is not the Bürgeramt

One structural point causes an enormous amount of wasted effort. The Bürgeramt or Bürgerbüro is the citizens’ office, and it handles the Anmeldung, the compulsory registration of your address, along with identity documents and general municipal business. The Ausländerbehörde, the foreigners’ authority, is a different body with different staff and different powers, and it is the one that decides your residence title. Registering your address does not tell the Ausländerbehörde anything you need it to know, and the friendly clerk at the Bürgeramt has no authority whatsoever over your permit.

They also correspond differently. The Ausländerbehörde writes in German, sets deadlines, and treats an unanswered letter as an unanswered letter regardless of whether you understood it. If you cannot read the letter, that is not a reason to wait until you can. It is a reason to take it to an MBE counsellor this week. And the rule that underlies this entire chapter: never let a deadline run while you are looking for help. Filing a bare Widerspruch on time and adding reasons later is almost always recoverable. Filing a beautifully reasoned Widerspruch one day late usually is not.

Tools that help with the paperwork around it

Werkzeu.ge is a browser-based platform of tools for German bureaucracy, built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de. Several of its tools fit the tasks in this chapter, and one word of caution has to come first: none of them is Rechtsberatung. That is not a disclaimer we are adding for form. It is the RDG again. Section 2(3) Nr. 5 RDG expressly excludes from the definition of a legal service the presentation and discussion of legal questions and cases addressed to the general public. A tool that explains a category to everybody is on the right side of that line. Advice on your individual case is on the other side, and it belongs to a Rechtsanwalt or to one of the permitted bodies described earlier. Werkzeu.ge’s own terms say the same, and the platform is in beta until 30 November 2026, so tools may be incomplete. It also prepares and generates documents; it never submits anything to an authority on your behalf.

For working out where you stand before you talk to anyone, the Aufenthaltstitel-Checker walks through which residence title fits your situation, and the Blue-Card-Checker tests the EU Blue Card conditions. Both are Gast tools, free and usable without an account. Our chapter on finding English-speaking jobs in Germany covers the substantive routes those checkers point at, including the Blue Card without a degree and the Chancenkarte points system. If your case turns on a foreign qualification, the Anerkennungs-Navigator, also Gast, walks through the recognition procedure. Going into a consultation knowing which title you are arguing for makes the meeting shorter, and a shorter meeting is a cheaper one.

For the paperwork, the Formularamt is a searchable library of thousands of official federal, state and municipal forms, each with its source, retrieval date and status, filled in the browser with your entries staying on your device. It is a Gast tool. When a letter arrives that you cannot read, Amtspost-Eingang photographs it, runs text recognition in the browser and flags the deadlines it finds, without the letter leaving your device; it is Kostenlos, meaning free but requiring an account. The Behördenbrief-Decoder takes the pasted text of an official letter and tells you who is writing, what they want and by when, which is a real fit for an Ausländerbehörde letter; it is a Plus tool. Free tiers carry ads. Prices change, so check the current pricing rather than any figure you read elsewhere.

One tool needs an explicit warning rather than a recommendation. The Widerspruch-Baukasten (Plus) offers 32 templates for objections, and its own description lists what they cover: tax assessments, fines, dismissals, insurance, rent increases, BAföG and Kindergeld. Residence decisions are not among them, and that is the right call. A Widerspruch in a migration matter is the worst possible place for a template. Your objection is the document that frames your case for every stage that follows, the suspensive-effect problem under Section 84(1) AufenthG means a generic objection can be filed correctly and still leave you without status, and the reasoning that works depends on facts a template cannot know. Use the tool for a parking fine. For a refused permit, use a lawyer.

What to do next

Work through it in order. Find your nearest MBE office through BAMF-NAvI, or the JMD if you are under 28, and take the letter to them. It is free, the counsellor is trained, and if your case is straightforward it ends there. If a decision has already been refused, find the Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung on the last page first and write the deadline somewhere you will see it, because that date now outranks everything else in this chapter. If your application has been sitting for more than three months with no reason given, the Untätigkeitsklage under Section 75 VwGO exists precisely for that and it works.

If you do need to pay, verify the person in the official register at rechtsanwaltsregister.org before anything else, look for Fachanwalt für Migrationsrecht, and ask what Streitwert they are assuming and what the RVG produces at that value including VAT. If you cannot pay, apply for Beratungshilfe at your Amtsgericht before you instruct anyone, and read our chapter on legal aid first so you do not fall into the four-week trap. And whatever else you do, file within the month. A weak objection filed on time can be improved. A perfect one filed late is simply gone.