Immigrant
numbers to undergo “very significant” upward revision
The Minister
of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, has said today that the number of
immigrants in Portugal will undergo a "very significant" upward
revision.
By TPN/Lusa,
in News, Portugal · 05 Feb 2025 · 0 Comments
"In the
coming weeks there will be a very significant review of the numbers of
residence permits requested and issued", stressed the Minister of the
Presidency, on the program Política com Assinatura, hosted by Natália Carvalho,
on Antena 1.
For the
official, the updated data should be the "base for a discussion on
capacity and how public services are responding", as well as the economy's
response.
According to
the Report by the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) released
last September, the foreign population residing in Portugal increased by 33.6%
in 2023, compared to the previous year, totalling 1,044,606 citizens with
residence permits.
Leitão Amaro
highlighted that the Government already has preliminary information on the
revised numbers, ensuring that they will be known in the coming weeks.
"The
country will know that the numbers we were working with until a few months ago
have been largely surpassed. When we entered government, there were already
many more immigrants in Portugal," he added.
The minister
detailed that the revised figures refer to a period before the current
government was in office.
"There
was a pile of 440 thousand [processes] to be dealt with and that will be
entered. And these are numbers [until] the end of 2023. And until we closed the
expression of interest, there was also a very large entry", he explained.
António
Leitão Amaro pointed out a "very great irresponsibility that began in
2017", with the socialist government of António Costa, also accusing the
current secretary-general of the PS, Pedro Nuno Santos, of keeping his party
"in this irresponsibility" for eight months.
"Less
than two weeks ago, it seems to have started to go backwards. The following
week, it took another step, because after all, the expression of interest was
no longer supposed to exist", highlighted Leitão Amaro.
Pedro Nuno
Santos admitted, in a recent interview with Expresso, that not everything has
been done well in recent years regarding immigration.
The
socialist leader stressed, in the same interview, that anyone looking to live
in Portugal "must understand that there is a shared way of life, a culture
that must be respected", statements from which several socialists
distanced themselves.
In six
years, the number of legal foreigners in Portugal has more than doubled, rising
from 480,300 in 2017 to more than one million last year.
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