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Foreigners' Police changes fail to help

Despite improvements, lines and inefficient service continue

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 16th, 2008 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
The line outside the main office often forms as early as 2 a.m., and still people can be turned away.
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Perpetual waiting in lines, braving stampedes and navigating a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. For the huddled masses awaiting their turn to speak to one of the worn-out workers behind the partitions at Prague’s branch of the Foreigners’ Police, this is all standard procedure.
Since the country’s 2004 entry into the European Union, which brought an influx of immigrants, the branch has attained notoriety of almost epic proportions and, despite the recent efforts of police officials, the situation remains largely unchanged.
Each day, the office — by far the busiest of the seven in the Czech Republic — processes around 1,500 requests for such things as resident permits, passport registration and address changes.
The shortage of clerks, coupled with the impractical design of the complex where the branch is located, contributes to a daily routine of hellish scenarios.
Getting there is not straightforward, as the branch is obscurely situated in the back of a Žižkov supermarket. To find it, first-time visitors have to either follow their instinct, or, more frequently, the crowd of foreigners squeezed into the alleyway in front of the main entrance.
During a recent visit to the branch, Yelena K., a Ukrainian citizen who has been working here for the past three years, threw her arms up in despair as she waited to register her new passport. “I have been waiting here since 4:30 [a.m.], and still I am not sure if I will have any luck,” she said.
Apparently, getting up at 3 in the morning was not enough to secure her a front place in the disorderly queue.
“People start lining up in front of the building as early as 2 a.m., but even these people are sometimes out of luck,” said Radka Nichani, a visa-processing specialist who visits the branch on a weekly basis.
The explanation is simple. Minutes before the office opens, a horde of new people appears in the alleyway and elbows its way up to the door, disregarding those who had been standing in line for hours.
By the time a uniformed officer unlocks the main door, the desperate foreigners form an aggressive mob. Once the door is open, they rush the building in a matter of seconds, sweeping even uninvolved bystanders into a frenzied scramble for the ticket dispenser on the first floor, where non-EU citizens are processed.
“It’s an absolute massacre,” Nichani said. “If you’re caught in the current and can’t get out of the way, you risk injury.”
The cause of the panic, she added, is that only a certain number of applications can be processed in one day. When the individual departments reach their capacity, the dispenser is shut off. “The knowledge that you need to get processed and there aren’t enough tickets to go around causes a mass psychosis,” Nichani said.
Ticket profiteering
According to the accounts of several foreign nationals who visited the branch in recent months, the limited supply of tickets recently inspired a handful profiteers to use the dispenser as a business endeavor.
“Men would come to the machine and take all the tickets,” said Thi Thuy, a Vietnamese citizen who has lived in Prague for eight years. “Then they would sell them to people for as much as 2,000 Kč [$125].”
Upon hearing rumors of such practices, the Foreigners’ Police took preventive measures, stationing a police officer at the machine to guard the tickets.
“We conducted several investigations into this matter but, beyond hearsay, we were never able to prove that any of this was going on,” said Nina Gajdušková, spokeswoman for the Prague branch of the Foreigners’ Police. “Of course, it’s also true that no one is going to outwardly engage in such an activity in front of uniformed staff.”
When The Prague Post last reported on the tumultuous situation in 2006, the Prague branch of the Foreigners’ Police had just moved its client services from the regional headquarters on Olšanská street in Prague 3 to the nearby Koněvova. Back then, Foreigners’ Police Deputy Director Vladimír Podroužek insisted the chaos was only temporary.
Nearly two years later, Gajdušková admits a permanent solution is still not on the agenda. Since January, the branch had made several improvements, extending office hours and moving the highly frequented passports and visa application submission department to the other side of the building. By streamlining the system, residence permit applications submitted by citizens of other EU countries can now be processed in one day, Gajdušková said.
However, the two biggest problems — inadequate space and lack of qualified staff — are yet to be addressed. “We are well aware of the fact that ours is the most heavily burdened branch in the entire republic,” Gajdušková said. “Unfortunately, this coincides with our lack of civil workers who — let’s be honest — can have an easier job and better wages working in other fields.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com


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