Long waiting times for family reunification despite few cases

Why does Danish Immigration Service postpone a simple answer 5 times when there are very few pending applications for family reunification?

The photo shows a family from Eritrea which we helped to reunite after a long separation. It is not one of the two families described in the time lines at the end of the article.

In Refugees Welcome, we assist many refugees in their cases concerning family reunification – and we succeed in getting many refusals overturned. But the waiting times are still a source of wonder. Despite the fact that there are only approx. 2,000 pending cases, the expected response deadlines are postponed repeatedly, and end up being twice as long as promised. In this article we describe a case where the applicant received a letter 5 times, telling him that the decision would be delayed.

”The Danish Immigration Service wrote on 7 June 2024 that we expected to be able to decide the case by 1 August 2024 at the latest. We regret that we unfortunately cannot make a decision in the case before 1 August 2024. We expect to make a decision in the case before 15 September 2024.”

– see the time line for Haile at the end of this article.

Consequences for the applicants

The waiting times are not just frustrating for those involved but pose a real mental health risk. The Rockwool Foundation demonstrated in 2021 that refugee fathers who wait a long time to be reunited with their children and wives have twice the risk of receiving a psychiatric diagnosis as fathers who get their family to the country quickly. The survey also showed that almost eight out of ten of the fathers waited more than a year for their family, while one in four waited more than two years. It was the waiting time after the fathers themselves had been recognized as refugees that stretched the total waiting time.
 
It is bad to wait for an important decision and to be separated from your loved ones. But it is an additional mental and practical burden for a family when the finish line is moved every time it is within reach. You cannot plan anything, and you lose all confidence in the Danish system. Imagine that you have counted down five times to the day when you get an answer as to whether your spouse and child can come to live with you, after years of separation. But instead received a laconic auto-letter in your e-box with a new date. Haile, whose timeline you can see below, has been deeply unhappy to receive the many identical, impersonal letters about further postponement, which offer no explanation whatsoever – and this has made him nervous about whether they have found a problem in his case.
 
No one has looked into the consequences for the children and women who find themselves in the world's hotspots and wait for the Danish case handlers. Among them are Eritreans in Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda, Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, and Syrians in Lebanon and Turkey. They often live in miserable conditions, protected more or less by UNHCR and supported by their family father in Denmark – who may be on the extremely low self-support and return home allowance.

Slide from Asylforum at Danish Immigration Service, June 2024.

Reasons for the waiting time

Back in 2017, there was a large backlog of family reunification cases as a consequence of the large number who were granted asylum in 2015-2016. But since then, the number has fallen, and has been under control. Even so, the wait is still long. Since the spring of 2016, the number of asylum seekers in Denmark has been incredibly low and fairly stable. But also when it comes to asylum cases, it often takes more than a year to get a decision.
 
If family reunification is refused by the Danish Immigration Service, you can appeal to the Immigration Appeals Board. The waiting time here has been unreasonably long for many years. We have had a number of cases which have been with them for up to 2 years – which of course comes on top of the time it took for Immigration Service to make their decision. The Ombudsman stated in December 2020 that the board's case processing time was unreasonably long – but nothing happened until the piles of cases decreased a little on their own. In December 2022, we had three cases where the waiting time by then was between 25 and 27 months.
 
The reasons why waiting times are still unreasonably long – not only for family reunification, but also for asylum and extension – can be due to several things:
 
• The state's grants to the Danish Immigration Service follow the number of asylum seekers – and since that number remains very low, they cannot afford many employees. An increased grant to get rid of backlogs in the Immigration Appeals Board has probably not been at the top of the recent governments' wish list.
 
• During Mattias Tesfaye's ministerial tenure, all immigration authorities were ordered to prioritize the Ukrainian cases above all others. It has logically increased the waiting times for all other cases, when 45,000 Ukrainians got to the front of the queue and continues to do so.
 
• The special law for Afghans and the practice of the Paradigm Shift, where all residence permits are only granted for 1-2 years at a time, have created a circular movement which means a severe and unnecessary workload for the immigration authorities, and this draws resources from all other areas.
 
• There is no political interest in having cases regarding residence permits resolved quickly. The longer it takes before a number of family members arrive in Denmark, the better. The goal is, after all, "zero refugees to Denmark", according to the sitting Prime Minister. At Refugees Welcome, we have examples of refugees giving up their cases and moving to other countries – which is a success in the eyes of the Danish government. For the refugees who receive asylum under article 7(3), a two-year waiting period before you can even apply is even written into the law – reduced from three years after a trip through the court in Strasbourg.

Two fresh examples

We have pulled two of the cases from our free counseling out of the pile as an illustration. They are both from Eritrea and concern men who have married and had a child with a woman after they themselves received asylum in Denmark. One was granted permission in a fairly simple case, the other had to go the appeals route, but should also receive permission according to current practice. We have previously described other cases involving families that had already been established before fleeing and ended up waiting up to 8 years to be reunited.
 
As can be seen from the timelines, the problem is not only a lack of employees, but also poor organization of the work. It should not be necessary to postpone a decision 5 times.

(Click on the images to see them in better quality – the text is only in Danish)