"In the coming weeks there will be a very significant review of the numbers of residence permits requested and issued", stressed the Minister of the Presidency, on the program Política com Assinatura, hosted by Natália Carvalho, on Antena 1.

For the official, the updated data should be the "base for a discussion on capacity and how public services are responding", as well as the economy's response.

According to the Report by the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) released last September, the foreign population residing in Portugal increased by 33.6% in 2023, compared to the previous year, totalling 1,044,606 citizens with residence permits.

Leitão Amaro highlighted that the Government already has preliminary information on the revised numbers, ensuring that they will be known in the coming weeks.

"The country will know that the numbers we were working with until a few months ago have been largely surpassed. When we entered government, there were already many more immigrants in Portugal," he added.

The minister detailed that the revised figures refer to a period before the current government was in office.

"There was a pile of 440 thousand [processes] to be dealt with and that will be entered. And these are numbers [until] the end of 2023. And until we closed the expression of interest, there was also a very large entry", he explained.

António Leitão Amaro pointed out a "very great irresponsibility that began in 2017", with the socialist government of António Costa, also accusing the current secretary-general of the PS, Pedro Nuno Santos, of keeping his party "in this irresponsibility" for eight months.

"Less than two weeks ago, it seems to have started to go backwards. The following week, it took another step, because after all, the expression of interest was no longer supposed to exist", highlighted Leitão Amaro.

Pedro Nuno Santos admitted, in a recent interview with Expresso, that not everything has been done well in recent years regarding immigration.

The socialist leader stressed, in the same interview, that anyone looking to live in Portugal "must understand that there is a shared way of life, a culture that must be respected", statements from which several socialists distanced themselves.

In six years, the number of legal foreigners in Portugal has more than doubled, rising from 480,300 in 2017 to more than one million last year.