Research · Berlin · May 2026

Immigration is something you can do yourself.

We’ll show you how.

A note on what this is

A research workbench, not a consultancy.

Team: Editorial · Berlin
Sources: BAMF · PVOG · ANABIN
Reviewed: May 2026

You probably landed here after a Reddit thread, a forum, or a Google search for something the local immigration office told you to figure out yourself. This page is not a paid consultancy, not an affiliate guide, and not a chatbot wrapper around the BAMF website. It is a research workbench built by an editorial team in Berlin who reads the AufenthG so you do not have to.

The law

Read the statute, not someone's blog post about it

Most immigration questions end at a paragraph of German legal text. The /laws section publishes 497 statutes — AufenthG, AufenthV, StAG, BeschV and the rest — with a B1-level plain-language layer next to the original German. Every paragraph cited in your residence permit, your fiktionsbescheinigung, or your naturalization decision is in there with a stable URL you can paste into an email to your lawyer. We do not paraphrase the law into oblivion; we explain it next to it.

/laws · 497

The city

Service Berlin / LEA, demystified

If you live in Berlin, the /services area covers 85 PVOG-sourced procedures handled by the Landesamt für Einwanderung and the borough Bürgerämter: residence permit applications, blue card renewals, naturalization, fiktionsbescheinigung, family reunification. Each page lists the actual responsible authority, the required documents, the fee schedule, and the appointment route.

/services · 85

The tools

Two tools that answer a single question

/visa-check is an AufenthG eligibility walker: a few honest questions about your job, salary, qualification and family situation, and it returns the residence titles you actually qualify for with the section numbers attached. /recognition is an ANABIN-backed degree lookup — upload your transcript, get the German equivalence status straight from the official KMK database. Both tools are free, work without an account for the basics, and link back into /laws so you can verify the reasoning yourself.

/visa-check · /recognition