“We respect freedom of opinion. Something different from freedom of opinion is extremism revealed in opinions, provocations between people who are demonstrating, messages of hate or intolerance, or political exploitation of these freedoms of expression. This is a different thing and must be distinguished,” said the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro.

Leitão Amaro was responding to a question during the Council of Ministers' briefing on the peaceful protest of dozens of immigrants that took place at the facilities of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), in Porto, and the intervention of the police to remove a man who infiltrated the protest with anti-immigration words and clashed with demonstrators.

The minister assured that the government listens to those who “express their concerns because the State is slow to respond to their legitimate requests”, but also listens to the concerns of people who express concern about the “lack of control in migration policy”.

“We can only tell people who are concerned about the lack of documentation that they have the right to have it because they comply with Portuguese law and simultaneously tell people who are concerned about security checks (...) that we listen to them and that we are reacting when we take measures like these. Otherwise we are falling into one of the extremes because we build walls or because we lead people down a path of indignity,” he said.

Leitão Amaro highlighted that the Government has already responded to the 440,000 requests for regularization that were pending, although nearly half of them have not been approved, stating that this was an important change implemented by the current executive because “people who were undocumented now receive a response from the State”.

The minister also said that “the time when we turn a blind eye” to issues such as the lack of criminal records and the collection of biometric data from immigrants is over, adding that disregarding the rules was “unfair to those who came with the effort to comply with the laws and to all Portuguese people who comply with the laws in their daily lives”.

“We need to be a country of rules. Only by having rules can we ensure that the bridges that we have not closed, the walls that we have not built, but which are bridges, are sustainable bridges and that at each point, we as Portuguese society, in public services, in the economy, have the capacity to integrate these people with humanism”, he concluded.

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