Paris, October 17, 2025,
Yesterday, October 16, 2025, several dozen Portuguese students and young workers met at Casa André de Gouveia, the House of Portugal in the International University City of Paris, an exceptional space where a number of international students and researchers reside, and cross paths, in the city of lights, during their studies and academic research. There are dozens of houses representing various nationalities, foundations or universities. Portugal has been present in this international university residences project since 1967.
It is worth mentioning that the author of this letter is, for the second time, a resident and member of this particular community, having been admitted to this gigantic complex of university residences – no more than 6000 residents per semester – thanks to Casa de Portugal, his country of origin, but living, of his own free will, in Casa da Alemão, participating in a house exchange program.
The evening’s program included a welcome ceremony, in the presence of the Consul of Portugal in Paris, Mónica Lisboa, and other members and institutions of the Portuguese community in French lands. After an admirable and insightful speech by the Consul, which clearly understood the issues and questions about the migratory phenomenon of highly qualified young Portuguese people, we ate some delicacies from our homeland and discussed among ourselves.
After my first bite of my Pastel de Nata, courtesy of the house, Mrs. Consul questioned me and asked me if I missed it yet. The pastel de nata is, obviously, the iconic symbol of our nation, an international image of our exceptional pastry and our immeasurable tourism.
My answer, too spontaneous – from someone who often passes by at diplomatic conventions – is that I have the habit of going to the Portuguese pastry shop which is located in the nearest Parisian suburb, just a few minutes away from the House of Germany where I live. To get there, simply cross, via a bridge, the so-called Parisian peripheral road, which separates the city of Paris from its suburban communities. The Consul responds in a cordial and affable tone that, in fact, sometimes we ask the wrong questions and thus get unexpected answers.
This pastry shop, called Pão Quente, is located in the Paris suburb of Gentilly, a place with an important Portuguese presence, a legacy of several waves of migration, which built the Portuguese diaspora in France. This same diaspora that the Consul wisely spoke of in her speech, defending its crucial role in the foreign policy of the Portuguese State, especially in its aspect of soft powerof influence on other civil societies. This same diaspora sometimes creates discomfort among members of the Portuguese academic and intellectual elite who attend large French higher education institutions.
In the tranquility of the expatriate bourgeoisie, an attempt is made to avoid the pejorative image associated with our compatriots, a symptom that class often speaks louder than nationality.
At this moment, the author of this text thinks about the exhibition in the entrance hall of Casa de Portugal, the same place where students ate patties and miniature Berlin balls, drank Água das Pedras and Portuguese wines, white or red.
The exhibition is called Songs of the Portuguese Exile at the dawn of the Carnation Revolution, proposed by Universidade Nova de Lisboa, within the scope of the EXIMUS project, in partnership with other institutions.
This exhibition essentially focuses on the intellectual and artistic elite who fled the miserable 60s and 70s, in order to express their disagreement, or anger, towards an authoritarian nationalist and imperialist regime. This same regime that preferred to send its youth to Africa, to return in coffins or with fewer limbs, than to face the weakness and absurdity of the ideology that it mercilessly imposed on its people. These singers and composers came to Paris and other parts of Europe, where they recorded and translated for other Europeans in their tireless revolt. However, they did not forget the spirit of their homeland and went to the slums of Portuguese immigrants in France, the slumsand they sang in the language of Camões for their countrymen – many of them bricklayers, laborers, doormen, cleaners, hard workers, and often miserable, who with their sweat raised France from the so-called glorious thirty.
I believe that some of us, from this beautiful generation of mine, educated and well cultivated, who fled the economy of low wages, few opportunities and an unbearable cost of living, sometimes dishonor the memory of our predecessors who, in the 60s and 70s, walked on the same ground that we tread today in the House of Portugal, or on French universities and stages. We want to be as far away as possible, geographically and symbolically, from these slums contemporary, of these layers of the population, and we try to construct ourselves as essentially different from them, eliminating the heritage of these Portuguese lower classes of which we should be proud.
After this evening, I crossed the distance that separates Casa Lusa from Casa Germânica. In my room, I open the newspaper and read the national news, a reflection of those who still believe in a better country. I call some of my few friends who remained on the banks of the Tagus and who did not set sail for other seas. I admit that it was a difficult moment, given the news that filled the newspapers – I confess that the words that shocked me the most were, indeed, those of a former prime minister. Pedro Passos Coelho spoke this Thursday at the presentation of the book Introduction to Liberalismby Miguel Morgado, in the presence of other prominent figures in national politics. My shock at Passos’ words is not so much due to the natural and almost primitive disagreement I have with this personality in Portuguese politics – who marked the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adolescence – but because of the veracity of some of his words. Passos Coelho stated that he fears that people may feel like “foreigners in their own land”. I share this opinion of our former prime minister, but I go much further.
Many of us already feel like foreigners in our own terra.
Almost a third of young Portuguese people between the ages of 15 and 39, born in Portugal, live abroad, according to data from the Migration Observatory. The migratory profile of emigrants has changed in the last decade, with the most qualified now accounting for the largest share of new departures. Numbers often hidden by the large number of entries. No wonder our homeland seems to us something other than our homeland, when so few of our generation remain.
We’ve felt this way for a long time, in fact. It is difficult to live in a country where public policies or the words of certain heads of government imply that we are not welcome. In a country that is for those foreigners who occupy our cities, our apartments, our streets, our cafes, which have become spaces for coworking for this invasive species known as digital nomadsleaving us little space to live or, at the very least, exist. Those who come to eat pastéis de nata or invest the capital that young people here don’t have in the real estate sector or others.
I also admit that I don’t like to criticize those who travel, as I am also lucky and privileged to be part of this group. In fact, many of the tourists are in no way responsible for the gentrification of our cities and the destruction of our cultural heritage – those shops, bars, associations emblematic of our city that closed to become Airbnb or restaurants where Portuguese or Lisbon authenticity is sold on menus in English, served by immigrants who are paid little and who are progressively denied fundamental rights. These same rights that our State tries to guarantee to the Portuguese diaspora in other lands, as the Consul reminded the group of young Portuguese present yesterday.
Paraphrasing our remarkable captain, I ask – who is responsible for the state we have reached? It is our State, sovereign in our territory and with the maximum authority, within the respect of constitutional limits. Our State has the capacity to regulate tourism – a sector that has contributed to economic growth, but above all to the increase in travel costs and the consequent amplification of social inequalities – this tourism that has stimulated a low-wage economy, of Disneyfication of our culture and encouraged immigration to meet their cannon fodder needs.
It is up to the executive and legislative branches of our State and whoever personifies them to regulate these phenomena, not only tourism, but also immigration – especially immigration that makes it impossible for young people to access the real estate or rental market. Interestingly, in the new Immigration Law, it is precisely the immigrants who participate in real estate speculation who are excluded from the regulation, those on Gold visas and assimilated, and the deprivation of immigrants’ rights is reduced to those who make our country work, who work in our agriculture, construction, tourism and other sectors. Now, when we talk about those who enter our country and make us feel like we are not welcome in our homeland, we need to be more rigorous.
Perhaps, Mr. Passos Coelho, the problem lies more with those who leave Portugal than with those who enter our country. Perhaps the reason why the immigrant population has progressively more weight in our demography is because of the political choices made by people like you and some of those who followed you, who occupied positions in sovereign bodies – that word that expresses the maximum power to regulate the life of the nation. Perhaps, if other policies had been truly implemented, such as the regulation of the housing market or the rent cap – which does not cause any confusion for the Portuguese who live in cities where such measures are common currency, such as Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin. Or, perhaps, control of foreign investment – instead of this scandalous doors wide open to millionaire speculators, that we have known for the last 15 years. Or, perhaps, the stimulation of research and the retention of talent – instead of the commodification of higher education and research that we have seen, which sometimes makes higher education more accessible in other lands than ours and the work of a researcher more respected and valued outside our borders. Or, perhaps, the promotion of sectors with high added value, not only economic value, but also social and cultural value – instead of sectors that, to obtain profits for a handful, require a level of exploitation to which certain Portuguese are not willing to submit, and to which, unfortunately, these immigrants who want to take away their rights submit.
Maybe, maybe, if all this had been done, we wouldn’t feel like foreigners in our own land…
Missing words from a young emigrant,