Speaking at the parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees, in a hearing requested by the Bloco de Esquerda e Livre, Luís Goes Pinheiro stated that there are 342 thousand pending issues in the chapter of “expressions of interest and administrative processes for residence authorisation”, to which adds up to “70 thousand processes that are in progress”.

In total, there is a maximum amount of pending issues “slightly above 400 thousand” requests to be resolved by the Portuguese authorities, Goes Pinheiro told deputies.

This number should decrease when many processes are closed, because immigrants choose to go to another country or manage to regularise in another way, namely through the mobility visa of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) and family reunification.

“The context of pending [a process] is waiting for an action” by AIMA, explained Goes Pinheiro.

Part of these processes refers to the expression of interest, a legal resource, now extinct, that allowed the normalisation of processes for foreigners arriving in the country on a tourist visa.

In May, AIMA sent 223 thousand emails to request early settlement of appointments for regularization processes regarding this resource, and 110 thousand were paid.

The remainder, as they are not paid, may be considered closed by the services, if no other steps are taken.

However, Goes Pinheiro admitted that “regardless of whether there are 300 thousand or 400 thousand”, they are “a very significant number” and any type of solution to the problem must be “possible to scale”.

All because “it is not enough to solve current problems”, but to ensure a “capacity [to AIMA] so that, in an elastic way, it responds to variations in demand that are often sudden”.

In the case of requests from immigrants in Portugal, he highlighted that “demand varied in a very unstable way” and it is necessary to ensure technological resources that “allow the response to be scaled”.

After the end of the pandemic, there was an exponential increase in requests for regularisation, which “made the SEF [Foreigners and Borders Service] absolutely incapable of responding”, the person in charge concluded.