It is the same action carried out in Lisbon recently, organized by the immigrants themselves, with the support of associations such as Solidariedade Imigrante.
Porto will be the scene of an immigrant protest on Wednesday morning. The event will take place in front of the city's Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA). The demands are the same as those of the protest held in Lisbon a few days ago.
The issue at hand is the impossibility of renewing residences and the lack of means of contacting AIMA. Another demand, especially from communities in the Hindustani region, is the difficulty in speaking to the agency in cases where the immigrant's name is on the Schengen Area restriction list. This situation occurs when a citizen has already made an application for regularization in another European Union (EU) country.
According to Timóteo Macedo, from the Solidariedade Imigrante association, the situation has always existed. However, at the time of the former Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF), it was possible to contact the agency.
The protest also marks a position against the agreement reached between the Government and employers' confederations to obtain faster visas. "[The Government prefers] to do a favour to large companies and employers with the so-called VIA VERDE, to seek out national workers from third countries, while there are thousands of immigrants in Portugal who, in a scandalous way, continue to wait for their documents and their rights", points out Macedo.
In the activist's view, many foreign citizens in Portugal are "clearly with their lives on hold and at risk of being expelled, they could resolve the enormous need for labor, without having to resort to suspicious schemes that will serve nothing more than to feed the mafia networks of human trafficking."
Family reunification is a right that successive governments have been limiting. The last major opening of vacancies was in October 2022, during the government of the Socialist Party (PS) and the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF). When AIMA was created, a portal for the service was created, but limited to children who were already in the country, leaving out couples without children or with children outside the country.