Opinion – Ora Pois: Foreign residents in Portugal are almost twice as many as in 2015

The number of foreigners regularly residing in Portugal rose for the sixth consecutive year, reaching a record 771 thousand people in 2021.

The number represents almost double the 388,731 foreigners who officially lived in the country in 2015, the year in which migratory flows began to recover after the significant drop caused by the economic crisis.

The data are preliminary and were advanced by the SEF (Foreigners and Borders Service) in a report published in the Diário de Notícias.

In 2021, the country recorded an increase of about 109,000 immigrants compared to the previous year.

This does not mean, however, that all of them arrived in the country in 2021.

Chronically overloaded, Portuguese immigration services usually take at least two years to process regularization requests.

Although the SEF has implemented several routines to speed up the processes – such as the creation of a system for the automatic renewal of residence permits – progress is still slow.

Portuguese legislation has mechanisms that allow the regularization of foreigners who have stayed in the country irregularly, such as someone who has traveled as a tourist and stayed to work.

Although this is traditionally one of the main forms of migration to Portugal, it is highly discouraged by experts. The regularization process is bureaucratic and lengthy. While they do not have their documentation up to date at the SEF, foreigners are even more subject to situations of social vulnerability and labor exploitation.

BRAZILIANS

The Portuguese authorities have not yet disclosed the division by nationality, but everything indicates that Brazilians remain the largest foreign community in the country.

According to previous data, from 2020, there were 183,993 Brazilians legally residing in Portugal: equivalent to almost 28% of the total number of foreigners in the country.

The actual number of Brazilians in Portugal, however, is even higher than indicated in official statistics.

People with dual citizenship from Portugal or from another European Union country do not enter the migration data as being Brazilians. Whoever is in an irregular situation in the country is also invisible to this account.

According to Itamaraty, the official estimate is that there are around 300,000 Brazilians in Portugal. Entities supporting immigrants, however, consider the total to be even higher.

With more deaths than births, Portugal has immigration as an important tool to reduce population decline.

Most of the immigrant community is economically active and plays a key role in strategic sectors of the Portuguese economy, such as tourism and agriculture.

According to the latest report by the Migration Observatory, foreigners also have significant payments to the country’s Social Security, with more than 1 billion euros in contributions in 2020.