A middle-aged man, originally from South America, who prefers not to give his name, waits outside the doors of the Casa del Mar, on Avenida Vuit d'agost, to be attended to at the Immigration Office. He has come without an appointment, but he has a query he needs to resolve and he assures us that obtaining it ‘is very complicated’. His case is not an exception, but there are several users of this office who say that it is almost an odyssey to get these appointments.
In addition to the bureaucratic difficulties between the different administrations involved in the residency or nationality process, obtaining these appointments is also difficult. G. has been going through the process for more than four months. «Appointments are only available once a week, first thing on Friday morning. As we all know, we are ready at that time, but it is very difficult to get an appointment', he explains. This is why he has gone directly to the Casa del Mar.
Like him, Nataly is waiting to be seen without an appointment, despite her best efforts to secure one. She claims to have heard that 'if you pay 40 or 50 euros in the call shops, they can get you one — I don't know how', but she refuses to pay. This means that the final step she needs to take to 'finally get the definitive NIE' is on hold.
The payment Nataly refers to is most probably related to a computer bot that blocks these types of appointments and then resells them. In May 2023, the National Police arrested 69 people in different provinces, investigated another 25, and dismantled a network that had blocked the online Extranjería appointments system using a computer bot to obtain the available appointments, as reported by Europa Press.
No appointments
The 'bot' detected when appointments were released in the different provinces and obtained them by preloading the data and programming it to control the release of appointments 24 hours a day, thereby compromising the system's operational functionality.
Nevertheless, the reality is that users of Extranjería are struggling to obtain these appointments. Nataly has been trying for months without success. «I go in first thing every Friday morning, but it's impossible,» she says, frustrated at being unable to complete «that last step». She is not complaining about the people who work in Extranjería, who she says have always treated her very well, but rather about the difficulties in getting these appointments.
No complaints or claims
In this regard, and when asked by this media, the Government Delegation assures that "at present there is no complaint or claim related to lack of appointments in the OEX of Ibiza. Around thirty appointments are made every week, to which must be added the cases referred by other institutions (Police, Island Councils, Town Halls, etc.) that are dealt with urgently".
The central government body also assures that there are cases where appointments are made but later cancelled by the applicant and can therefore be rebooked. All files submitted to the OEX in Pitiusas and Menorca are processed and resolved centrally in Palma. As far as the Ibiza office is concerned, a total of 2,381 applications have been processed up to 30 June this year (compared to 3,360 applications in the whole of 2024).