8,000 cards issued and not delivered, at least in gross or general terms
President of AIMA admits that one of the reasons may be the existence of old emails from people who have been waiting for years to be called.
The president of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), Pedro Portugal Gaspar told Lusa on Monday in Porto that daily, for almost a year, 15% of immigrants scheduled to regularize their situation in the country do not attend.
"At first it was around 10% and now it has increased a little, so it is around 15% in which people who are scheduled do not appear daily," said the official in statements on the margins of the conference "Being Immigrant in Portugal", promoted by the Civic Association +Porto.
Pedro Portugal Gaspar admitted that this is a "worrying issue", saying that "several alerts on the website [of AIMA] for people to update the address" were published.
“One of the reasons we consider is that eventually it is due to the problem of emailsemails [of people] who have been waiting for years to be called by the administration,” continued the president of AIMA, who lamented the existence of “an installed charge that is not optimized.”
In his speech at the conference, Pedro Portugal Gaspar stated that AIMA has "the ability to schedule and receive 1000 people daily, but what is a fact is that 150 do not appear", a situation that worsens when it is known "there are people who do not get the schedule".
“There’s something here that I don’t understand. The blame, for sure, that will also be of AIMA and AIMA assumes the responsibilities, I have no problems with this. Now, there's something that doesn't work out right. Because people don't show up, what are you waiting for?" he asked.
The same is true, even on a smaller scale, with the collection of residence permit cards, explaining the person who "also happens to return cards" because the holders "were not at the destination of delivery of the same" and that, after, "they demote to be withdrawn, although AIMA makes several insistence to communicate the existence of these cards".
“There must be about 8,000 cards issued and not delivered, at least in gross or general terms,” he said.
In the question and answers phase of the conference, Pedro Portugal Gaspar heard reports from lawyers about the difficulties of completing cases of people who have been working in Portugal for two or more years and with the criminal record clean, despite the needs of labor for agriculture and construction and the risk of requests rejected by AIMA have as a result the clogging of the courts with requests for appeal from immigrants.
Others present alerted the head of AIMA about the "duality of criteria" of the employees in the allocation of authorizations, suggesting "training to those who are in the service".
In his final intervention, the president of AIMA recalled that "Portugal lives a very exceptional situation, which combined the change of administrative structure, increase in volume, new rules of legislative solution, and therefore all this causes some embarrassment", concluding that "only demagogically can be said that this was very easy to solve".