Portugal fell into the cleverly organized ruse of not discussing its development model, not discussing its demography, not discussing the remuneration structure that takes young Portuguese people abroad, not discussing the various inequalities that dominate Portuguese society, nor public security as an affirmation of the state and the exercise of citizenship.
The cunning ruse placed the most renowned commentators, analysts and politicians discussing perceptions, primary feelings and news item of everyday life, without great interest for our present and without any relevance for our future.
And it is on this journey that we all found ourselves faced with the simplistic option of being for or against immigration, with the dizziness of qualifying the other without knowing them. Parroting generalities, and, above all, without taking care to know in depth and rigor why we arrived at the current situation and how we are going to build the future.
What seems to be true today is that we don’t know how many we are, who we are and what we are like. And, on the answer to this question, a lot depends on whether we know what we will be like.
Official data tells us that, at the end of 2024, 1,543,000 foreign citizens lived and worked in Portugal.
Taking the 2021 Census as a reference, 592,547 citizens with Portuguese nationality and born abroad resided in Portugal.
Admitting that these more than two million citizens already have some kind of relationship with the Portuguese public administration that allows it to know about their existence, we have now been “informed”, in a moment of sincerity (naivety?) oratory, that there are “large tens of thousands of people who are irregularly in national territory.”
Conclusion?
No one truly knows the dimension, quantitative and qualitative, of what they are dealing with.
And, as long as this basic issue is not resolved, the news itemgeneralization, summary judgment, loud noise, trickery and ruse.
But worse, until we know the present we cannot deal with the future.
The first census of the Portuguese population was carried out in 1864 and since 1890 censuses have been carried out at intervals of a decade. It turns out that the reality of past centuries has little to do with today’s population dynamics. Perhaps that is why some countries are already adopting different population census models.
Shouldn’t Portugal promote an extraordinary census moment that would substantiate and give credibility to policy options?
Between knowledge and shouting, the former is always preferable.
Lawyer and manager