“Instead of correcting errors, Socialist government showed indifference”
A new controversy has opened up over the Easter weekend: that of over 120,000 immigrants who were able to enter Portugal during the ‘dying days’ of former borders agency SEF without the necessary background checks.
Indeed, the most ‘important’ background check – that of criminal antecedents – was completely sidelined.
The story was broken by Jornal de Notícias on Friday, explaining that “the automatic residency authorisation” was created in 2023, by the then Socialist government of António Costa (now president of the European Council), destined for immigrants from the CPLP (Community of Countries with the Portuguese Language: Brazil, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé e Príncipe and Cabo Verde). In practice, however, it meant that processes that originated in ‘expressions of interest’ (the now closed doorway into Portugal from any country overseas) were automatically transformed into a CPLP residence permit, valid only for one year.
“These applicants were given a one-year residence permit without any face-to-face assistance and/ or manual verification of documents submitted, such as the compulsory criminal record”.
This lapse was verified by AIMA – the agency created to replace SEF – which calculated that 120,157 people had managed to get residency authorisations without proving that they ‘ticked all the boxes’ to actually qualify for them. It then fell to the current government (facing legislative elections in a month’s time) to decide on the plan of action: which was to insist that every single residency had to be properly checked for a criminal record in their country of origin.
AIMA’s analysis quickly threw up various anomalies: some of the files that obtained residence permits “found blank sheets of paper in place of the criminal records that had to be submitted by the applicants”; others detected false documents in place of criminal records.
“Some were more elaborate, but others didn’t even look like official documents”, says JN.
The trouble with all this is how it was able to happen: the Association for Future Memory of SEF (PMF/SEF – made up of former employees of the agency ‘cancelled’ by António Costa’s government) insists that SEF warned the government of the “out of control (nature of) migratory regularisation”, as far back as 2017. “Instead of correcting the mistakes, the Socialist government showed itself to be indifferent. Further legislative changes were made, on the limits of community law, which led to the automatic residency authorisations of 2023”, the association has told Correio da Manhã.
According to sources for PMF/ SEF, “one of the reasons for SEF’s extinction was the desire, at the time, to create an organisation that was more permeable to political and party-political orientations”.
Adding to the sense of unease over this situation, is the assurance by former Minister for Interior Administration José Luís Carneiro that “Portuguese speaking immigrants who obtained automatic residency authorisations were subject to security verifications” – suggesting non-Portuguese speaking immigrants (of which the country has many thousands) were not.
As national media has been explaining, the number of foreigners living in Portugal has skyrocketed in recent years, to the extent that they now account for 15% of the population, while employers continue to say they need “more labour from abroad”. ND
Source material: Jornal de Notícias/ Correio da Manhã/ SIC Notícias
