Gouveia e Melo warned that “the economy does not change its paradigm overnight”, so, if immigration for lower-skilled jobs is closed”, the country will be left without “people to do these jobs”.
“Therefore, our economy will suffer. We have to be smart, we have to do this gradual process. In the future, this law will make perfect sense. In the present, there has to be a gradual process to change what is the situation we want in the future, in five or six years”.
The candidate considers that immigration regulation “is always important, because an unregulated system could bring problems in the future”, but warns that, without immigrants, the economy would be “unsustainable”.
“Without immigrants, in 15 years we will have, for every active person, four active workers. If we continued like this, we would make our economy unsustainable”, he stressed.
Gouveia e Melo pointed out that Portuguese society is “aging”, requiring “young people”.
“We need to regulate and select people who are of interest to our economy, so that these people can add to our community. And it is not creating hatred. If there are people from other communities who bring extremism, hatred or insecurity, You have to decide based on data, not based on impressions. Therefore, there are also some red lines that must be respected”, he said.
Asked about António Costa’s PS policy regarding immigration, the presidential candidate noted that, at the time, the economy was in great need of unskilled workers”.
“Somehow we opened the doors in an uncontrolled way and now we are facing the problem of this opening”, he indicated.
For Gouveia e Melo, “there should have been greater control” and the Foreigners and Borders Service “should not have been dismantled, because that weakened that control even more”.
The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, promulgated on Thursday the Foreigners Law, which changes the legal regime for the entry, stay, departure and removal of foreigners from national territory.