Useless Queues (photo report)
"Only 120 employees of Prague’s Foreigners Police are responsible for a hundred thousand foreigners; the numbers of foreigners keep growing, but the number of our employees stays the same. We process up to 2000 stays a day", explains an employee of Prague’s Foreigners Police. According to him, the situation regarding the "queues" is under control and the extended waiting time experienced by some foreigners is because of the publicity in the media. In the first half of December, it was estimated that up to 3000 people came per day. It is now the 19th December, and as the end of the year is approaching, the queues in front of Prague’s Foreigners Police new building in Konevova Street are notably shorter. Nonetheless, they are still there.
At around 6am the situation is most dramatic; the only door opens, people start crowding in, breaking through the barriers. Luckily nobody is hurt. By 7am the people who came on the previous evening or at night are already inside and the queue starts decreasing. "I really don't like waiting in queues", says Xena from Zakarpattia. It is an allusion to the famous sentence from the TV news which claimed that foreigners liked to queue. Her fellow queue-weary foreigners loudly support her claim.
"I loose a lot of time here, I’ll be waiting from the early morning and all afternoon", says Svetlana from Macedonia, who is studying at the Electro-Technical Faculty of the Czech Technical University in Prague. At least she does not have to queue two twice; today she will be given a long-term stay extension.
At 7:20 the site is empty. It seems that everyone succeeded in getting a sequence number.
