THE PORTUGUESE government has temporarily turned off the tap to legal immigration from non-European Union countries following an avalanche of applications from West Africa and Asia.
On Friday the Council of Ministers approved an emergency regulatory law by which thousands of registered but unprocessed immigrants working in Portugal will have to wait until October before the immigration services (Serviço Estrangeiros e Fronteiros (SEF)) once again begins processing legalisation documents.
Despite a new immigration law approved by parliament on August 3, scores of immigrants will now not be able to book appointments with SEF to process their residency documentation papers.
The measure was taken after get-tough regulations were introduced in both Italy and Spain which has been swamped with immigrants in recent years, particularly from Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and the Balkans in the case of Italy, and West Africa, Asia, Latin America and China in the case of Spain.
Put on ice
Now those same immigrants, turned away from Spanish and Italian immigration offices, are trying their luck in Portugal because of the new relaxation in the law.
This has resulted in a torrent of applications and jammed phone lines at SEF as well as at the Ethnic Minorities and Immigration High Commission in Portugal from those turned away in Spain and Italy.
The Minister of Internal Administration (Administração Interna) Rui Pereira has admitted that the new immigration law has been temporarily put on ice, even though it legally came into effect earlier this month, because it cannot cope with the floods of applications.
But this also means that thousands of immigrants already living and working in Portugal in a situation of limbo for two years or more, after having been promised their residence and work permit documents, will now have to wait until October at the very earliest to become legal.
Following José Socrates’ election victory in 2005, the new PS government promised to fulfil its election pledge to make legalisation for Brazilians, Angolans, Mozambicans, that had already been working in the country and paying national insurance contributions (segurança social), easier.
And after repeated postponements for the law’s approval, which has originally been slated for rubber stamping at the end of 2006, the immigration authorities began telling frustrated applicants to await the introduction of Immigration Law 23/2007 on August 3, the date from which thousands of immigrants flooded the offices of the SEF.
Difficulties
In the first five days following August 3, Portugal Telecom registered 900,000 calls to SEF’s Contact Centre with many immigrants only managing to get through to an operator after trying repeatedly for four solid days.
However, a former Secretary of State under the previous PSD government, Nuno Magalhães, claims that the government has “always known it would have these kind of difficulties and should have prepared for it a long time ago by tightening up the restrictions through which the new law was applied.”
Even worse in terms organisation and preparation, the new law came in at the very time when the government must have known that at least half of SEF staff would be on holiday.
However, the Ministry of Internal Affairs argues that it could not have controlled that factor because of “legal procedures that were outside the government’s control, such as the law’s promulgation by the President of the Republic.”
The new law, approved on August 3, and now temporarily shelved, was aimed at existing immigrants with employment contracts making social security deductions.
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