Immigrant service centers will open in Braga and Porto.
The Minister of the Presidency announced this Wednesday that, in the coming weeks, 15 service centers of the Mission Structure of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) will be operating in different locations across the country.
“This month we will have the mission structure operating in 15 locations across the country”, said António Leitão Amaro, in the parliamentary committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees, where he is being heard.
In addition to the largest, which has been operating since September in Lisbon, the minister indicated that immigrant service centers will be opened in Braga and Porto.
The governor stressed that these centers allowed “tripling the State’s service capacity”, increasing from 1,000 to 3,000 services.
Highlighting the “relevant impact” of this mission structure created to recover the more than 400,000 pending immigrant processes, Leitão Amaro said that it is not a “legalization option”, since only “those who comply with the law” obtain a residence permit.
“It is an operation to regularize documents and for the State to comply with the rules it has set,” he said, stressing that it is about “providing dignity and humanism, but also bringing order because this mechanism or regularization operation makes it possible to know who each of those people in Portugal are, where they are and what they do.”