Immigrants ‘transform’ Portugal’s decades of dwindling demographics
Between 70,000 and 75,000 Portuguese people chose to live in another country in 2023, a level of emigration that has been stabilised thanks to the entry of foreigners, which totalled 328,978 in the same year, according to official data.
The first provisional estimate of Portuguese emigration in 2023 indicates that between 70,000 and 75,000 Portuguese people will have emigrated that year – with data on France yet to be taken into account, according to information from ISCTE university institute of Lisbon, which will be hosting the conference “The obsession with migration: why are immigration and diversity policies constantly in crisis?” tomorrow (Thursday).
“There are signs of stabilisation of emigration in Portugal, which, in order to be compensated, must count on an equivalent entry of new immigrants into the country each year,” reads a note from ISCTE.
Tomorrow’s conference will be attended by Peter Scholten, former director of the largest European academic research network on migration, integration and social cohesion and will include the launch of the European Emigration Portal.
This portal will publish data on emigration from all countries in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland.
According to ISCTE, France is the European country where the most Portuguese live (almost 600,000 in 2024) and Switzerland was, in 2023, the country to which the most Portuguese emigrated (around 13,000).
Data on Portuguese emigration is published annually by the Emigration Observatory, which collects data on the entry and settlement of Portuguese people in other countries.
This is the methodology that the Emigration Observatory is now applying to measure and characterise emigration from all European countries, creating the first and only European portal with this information.
The most recent data on Portuguese emigration “allow us to discover that the idea that Portuguese emigration is one of the highest in Europe is false: Portugal’s emigration rate is intermediate”, says sociologist Rui Pena Pires, scientific coordinator of the Emigration Observatory until the beginning of this year.
“The data also confirms that, contrary to current ideas on the subject, emigration is not synonymous with underdevelopment, as demonstrated by the latest data from the United Nations. As a rule, the emigration rate is higher the higher the country’s human development index (HDI) is,” he said.
For Peter Scholten, professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, “migration policies should be integrated into conventional areas of sectoral public policy, rather than being a sectoral policy in itself”.
The former director of IMISCOE, Europe’s largest academic research network on migration, integration and social cohesion, argues that governments cannot manage the diversity and complexity of migration with a single, specific policy, centred on a secretariat of state or a ministry.
In 2022, around 60,000 Portuguese emigrated, with the United Kingdom losing importance due to Brexit, and Switzerland once again becoming the main destination country.
The latest estimates from the United Nations indicate that 1,799,179 Portuguese people were living abroad in 2024.
In 2023, according to the most recent data released by the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), 1,044,606 foreign citizens lived in Portugal. By the time 2024 data has been collated, the shortfall between emigration and immigration will almost certainly be minimal. ND
LUSA
