President of AIMA acknowledges delay in scheduling and response requests at immigration but states that the regrouping process begins this month, to speed up the integration of regularized immigrants.
The president of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) said that the Portuguese justice system has already imposed 17,000 meetings with immigrants, admitting a “great delay on the part of the administration”. Pedro Portugal Gaspar also downplayed the loss of functions for the PSP and said that, from this month, more vacancies will be opened for family reunification processes.
In an interview with Lusa, Pedro Portugal Gaspar stated that AIMA had to create an internal task force to respond to these notifications, filed by lawyers specializing in migration, admitting a “significant delay on the part of the administration in scheduling and responding to requests” from immigrants. However, he stressed, these delays are common to other state services, such as health or justice itself, and this legal resource is only being used with AIMA.
Pedro Portugal Gaspar recalled that the number of foreigners in Portugal has more than doubled since 2018, which has brought about the “problem of the size of the administration in relation to this response”.
The decisions of the administrative courts aimed to “condemn the administration for scheduling an appointment”, but “it was not to decide on the merits of the case”, of the procedural request for regularization, he added. In this sense, “it was a merely instrumental condemnation” to speed up scheduling issues and today “there are more than 17 thousand sentences always condemning AIMA and there is nothing to say, naturally”, because the organization “did not comply with the scheduling within 90 days”.
The race against time has already begun and “there may be a bureaucratic resolution of the processes”, but the “great challenge remains, which is the true integration and fulfillment of the migrant in the national space”.
Currently, AIMA carries out a thousand consultations per day and the mission structure carries out around 800, and it is estimated that, soon, there could be 2,000 consultations per day, in the combination of the two organizations, to face “a very large liability”, he stated.
Since the change in the law on foreigners on June 2, in the last four months, the number of entries “corresponds to more or less one month [of processes] in the time of expressions of interest”. On Monday, the Minister of the Presidency, Leitão Amaro, said that applications had decreased by 80%, with the end of expressions of interest. With the end of this legal figure that allowed a foreigner with a tourist visa to start working and begin their regularization process, “there is a lower influx of applications” for residence, confirmed Portugal Gaspar this Wednesday.
Regarding family reunification processes, the president of AIMA stated that they will begin in October, seeking to accelerate the integration of regularized immigrants.
This type of process has not been transferred to the mission structure that is resolving pending processes and is “an area in which we will move forward”, with priority over processes relating to changes of residence for investment. The objective is to begin “with an effective response capacity” of the services, extending the scheduling offer to a “very high age range of minors”, close to 18 years old.
Immigrants with minor children will be able to register on the portal and request an appointment for family reunification, thus being able to bring their families, which will bring “some uncertainty about the number of people” to regularize. It will be “an action to be developed with great emphasis and commitment on the part of AIMA”, he added.