Government moves on “very significant” regularisation backlog
Portugal’s government has today come up with a number of ways to tackle the massive immigrant regularisation backlog.
First, it has approved a one-year extension of the validity of documents and visas for immigrants.
Second, it has created a mission structure to recover pending cases (up to 400,000 of them), directing no less than 300 people to the task – and third it has approved the Action Plan for Migration.
The decision to extend the validity of documents and visas relating to residence in national territory by one year, until June 30, 2025” follows widespread complaints by immigrants that the action plan was being implemented without any kind of discretionary period.
In a statement after the Council of Ministers, the executive stressed that it had approved a decree-law (meaning this must be ratified by parliament/ promulgated by the president of the Republic), assigning AIMA (the agency for integrated immigration and asylum) “a mission of proactive attraction of immigrants“, “assuming and valorising the Migration Observatory as an organ” of that government agency.
At the same time, the executive approved a resolution creating a “Mission Structure for the Recovery of Pending Cases at AIMA”, which “will be responsible for analysing and deciding on pending cases of regularisation of foreigners”.
This structure “will operate until June 2, 2025 and will have up to 300 people dedicated to both the administrative processing of cases and assisting applicants“.
Yesterday in parliament, president of AIMA, Luís Goes Pinheiro, expressed his confidence that by the summer of 2025 the backlog, most of it inherited from the extinction of SEF (foreigners and borders agency), will have been resolved and authorities will only have to process current cases.
Speaking at the parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees, at a hearing requested by opposition parties Bloco de Esquerda and LIVRE, Luís Goes Pinheiro said that there are 342,000 pending cases in the chapter on “expressions of interest and administrative processes for authorising residences”, to which must be added “70,000 cases that are currently being processed”.
In total, this is a maximum figure of “slightly more than 400,000″ unresolved requests by the Portuguese authorities, he summarised.
This number should drop when many cases are closed, because the immigrants have chosen to go to another country or have managed to regularise their status in another way – namely through mobility visas from the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) and/ or family reunification.
A number of the cases in the backlog refer to ‘the expression of interest’ – a legal recourse that has now been abolished (allowing for foreigners arriving on tourist visas to request legalisation).
Goes Pinheiro explained that in May, AIMA sent out 223,000 emails asking for early settlement of appointments for regularisation processes relating to expressions of interest, and 110,000 were paid.The rest, because they have not been paid, are likely to be considered closed by AIMA “if there are no other endeavours”.
Source material: LUSA
