Norway's immigration office vows to cut citizenship application backlog
At the end of 2024, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) had just under 20,000 citizenship applications waiting for a response.
Around 80 percent of the citizenship applications waiting for a decision at the end of last year had applied in 2023 and 2024, while the remaining applicants has applied during or before 2022.
The UDI has set itself the goal of reducing the backlog of cases waiting for an answer by the end of the year.
'Our goal is to process more cases than the number of applications received in 2025, but internal reallocation of resources and external factors may affect how many applicants receive a decision this year. We are constantly working to improve and streamline our processes,' Per-Jan Brekke, team leader in the UDI's press office, told The Local.
Progress on cutting the waiting list had already been made in 2024, when the UDI received 21,700 applications for citizenship but managed to process 25,700 in total.
The UDI said that it hoped that its applications system would be improved throughout 2025 but that a new and improved IT system the government has invested in wouldn't be rolled out this year.
'The immigration sector is working on renewing our systems. In the citizenship department at UDI, we have a partly modernised platform and will further improve our processes throughout 2025 and coming years, but we do not plan to introduce a new case processing solution in 2025,' Brekke said.
'In the long term, this [the new IT system] will lead to shorter waiting times, but we do not believe the development work in 2025 will have a significant impact on waiting times,' he added.
Citizenship cases are either fully or partially automated at the UDI. Cases that are fully automated typically receive an answer within a few weeks or a couple of months of handing in their application, while others wait in excess of two years for an answer.
At the time of writing, the current waiting time for Norwegian citizenship for most foreign nationals was on average around 30 months.
Applications that can't be handled automatically are assigned to a caseworker. The UDI has previously told The Local that caseworkers processed a mix of new and older cases – with older cases being more time-consuming due to factors such as missing paperwork.
The directorate recently said that a drop-off in the number of people being granted citizenship between 2023 and 2024 was due to a mix of fewer applicants and less staff available to handle the applications, many of which still have to be done manually.
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