All immigrants already know, or should know, that the current scenario in Portugal, and in many other European Union (EU) countries, is anything but inclusive and increasingly restricted in terms of people living here without documents.
However, these same immigrants know that in the case of Portugal, the country itself is the cause of this high number of undocumented people. especially in cases of renewal (we didn’t have access to the request for two years, remember?).
It is no longer worth bringing up all the talk of guilt from the previous Government. Especially because, next April, the current Government will celebrate its two-year anniversary in power. And that doesn’t mean the document situation has changed. What has changed is that millions of euros have been earned, a sign that the problem was never budget.
If before people used an A4 sheet of paper that corresponded to the Expression of Interest, today we have another piece of paper, now with expired validity of all the interviews that were carried out and the documents are pending sending. The calculation, as said, is more than a year.
In his last statement, the Minister of the Presidency António Leitão Amaro declared that “those who prefer illegality” must leave, and will be expelled. And oh, there’s no shortage of money for that.
What’s the problem with this simplistic sentence? Unfortunately, in none of its statements to the nation does the Government admit its failure to efficiently execute immigration protocols. The Government does not comply with the law. It does not comply with it either regarding the articles granting residences to immigrants with visas or those exempt from visas, yes, dear reader, they exist and there are ten of them in total.
The executive in charge of the department also does not demonstrate reliability in analyzing the processes, given the thousands of rejections that require review. They are practically half of all refusals. We can therefore say, without error, that half of the service was poorly done. Imagine if workers simply did half the work poorly in their respective roles? And worse, who paid this bill? We Portuguese and the immigrants themselves with their submission rates. But if you do it wrong, the payment ends up being double, as it needs to be redone.
That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. The inefficiency is so great that it borders on incredulity.
But it doesn’t stop there. The Government also does not obey court orders, to the point that the Judicial Council itself organizes itself to “return” a problem that is not legal, but political, in the words of judge Eliana de Almeida Pinto, it is an artificial demand, because service does not even exist.
And when it comes to INSS, the NISS x Job Search visa dilemma remains. Since with expired visas you don’t have the number and without the number, immigrants cannot get the job, whose visa is precisely for this purpose, but who came without an appointment from the consulate. And I’m not talking about hundreds, but thousands.
It is even more important to mention that in this statement, the Government forgot about regroupings. We have a 180-day transition rule whose deadline ends in April, but without the issuance of cards, which have been delayed for more than a year, how can we make requests for the residences of their respective children, husbands and wives?
It is a non-access to the right!
We hear accusations about the Chega party being populist all the time in debates in Parliament. Without a doubt it is, and they don’t even disguise the caricature.
However, we are not far from a social democracy every time we speak about immigration with half-truths. Saying catchphrases with which radical voters are ecstatic “thousands of immigrants expelled”.
But in the end, the most important thing was not said: 90% of immigrants who are without valid documents have the undeniable right to reside in the country and the absence of a valid residence permit is due to a lack of organization by those responsible for issuing them, in other words, who are those who prefer to be illegal?
There is no detention center here for those who don’t do their jobs. There is no compensatory liability here for those who afflict people’s lives through pure mismanagement. There are no consequences here for those who say fallacies on national television. Because politicians are allowed everything.
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