Many immigrants have nowhere to go and end up sleeping on the streets in Lisbon
Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas (PSD) has called for the creation of a temporary reception centre for immigrants “as soon as possible”.
Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting on the economic impact of last year’s Catholic Church World Youth Day event (WYD), Moedas said that Lisbon cannot continue having immigrants sleeping on the street because they have nowhere else to go.
“We have to have a reception centre because the immigrants that arrive can’t be in Arroios in tents. This is painful, it’s unacceptable, and the mayor can’t do anything because most of them aren’t documented,” said Moedas.
The mayor said he was “very happy” to hear that the government had included the opening of temporary reception centres in its new immigration plan.
“I just need the government to tell me where it can be (located). There are already some places identified, we’re going to work on it and, quickly, we’ll have a centre where these people, when they arrive, have (access to) AIMA (Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum), the city council, civil protection, the Red Cross, the Santa Casa charity and we can all try to sort everything out together,” he said.
The location for the temporary reception centre for immigrants “is a government choice,” says Moedas, stressing that the decision should be made “as soon as possible”.
“That’s why I asked the government to find a former barracks or a former hospital that could house them temporarily. We’re talking here about a temporary centre to receive people with dignity,” the mayor stressed, noting that “there are several potential sites,” including the former military hospital in Belém.
The mayor also recalled that for a year he has been calling for “an immigration policy with dignity” in Portugal, because “no such policy existed” and the lack of protection for immigrants “multiplied the trafficking networks”, and he believes that the plan presented by the government responds to this need.
With the Migration Action Plan, the government put an end to the exceptional regime that allowed a foreigner to enter Portugal and only then apply for a residence permit and announced the creation of a mission structure to settle pending cases, estimated at 400,000.
“We’re finally going to have a policy with dignity here and we’re going to welcome people with dignity, because anyone who arrives in Lisbon is a Lisboner. We need more people to work, but we need to have a network, for example, for employment, where these people arrive, quickly have their documents and are often needed in other parts of the country,” said Carlos Moedas, emphasising the need for national coordination.
The mayor also highlighted the “wake-up call” about the situation of immigrants sleeping on the streets, in which he organised meetings with other mayors of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, because the city of Lisbon “can’t solve the problem on its own”.
“We have more than half of the country’s reception places in the city of Lisbon. We need the government. We need the country’s president, who was also the first to warn us,” stressed the mayor, highlighting the city’s investment of €70 million by 2030 in helping homeless people.
Carlos Moedas also praised the position of the former director-general of the International Organisation for Migration and former Socialist minister, António Vitorino, on the Migration Action Plan, as he considered it “a balanced plan”.
Source: LUSA
