One in five resident foreigners lives in overcrowded houses

  • Lusa
  • 20 December 2022

According to the report, the proportion of foreigners in Portugal living in overcrowded accommodation stood at 20.3% in 2021, one percentage point higher than in 2020.

One in every five foreign nationals resident in Portugal in 2021 was living in overcrowded accommodation, more than was the case the previous year, according to the 2022 Annual Statistical Report of the country’s Migration Observatory.

The result places Portugal in 13th place among European Union member states with the largest gaps between nationals and foreigners in this area.

According to the report, the proportion of foreigners in Portugal living in overcrowded accommodation stood at 20.3% in 2021, one percentage point higher than in 2020.

“The housing situation of the population in a country has numerous inherent structural factors, namely associated with land use planning itself, regulation of the housing market, social support and rehousing policies, and the country’s social and economic situation,” said Catarina Reis Oliveira, director of the observatory and the author of the report, which was launched on Monday.

According to the report’s results, in terms of the relationship between health and immigration, in general, immigrants in Portugal show more favourable indicators of the state of their health than the Portuguese themselves, with a higher prevalence of respondents classifying their state of health as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ (57.7% of foreign-born versus 49.5% of Portugal-born respondents in 2021, that is, 13.1 percentage points more of the immigrant group reported good health, compared with 63% and 50% in 2020.

Immigrants also tend to have fewer limitations in daily activities due to health problems and a lower proportion of social protection benefits due to illness, as well as a lower prevalence of chronic diseases.

“Considering the data from the last three years, a trend towards a large growth in foreign users enrolled in the SNS [National Health Service] is observed (from 600,212 in 2019, they increase to 685,619 in 2020 and 804,279 in 2021), and it is evident that this universe exceeds the number of foreigners with a valid residence permit in Portugal (in 2019 there were 102 foreign users enrolled in the SNS for every 100 foreign residents in the country, with this proportion rising to 104 in 2020 and 115 in 2021),” the study notes.

According to the same source, in 2020, the SNS employed 1,256 doctors of foreign nationality, 635 nurses of foreign nationality, 1,071 foreign operational assistants, and 266 foreign staff members in other health-related professions.

In recent years, there has been “a decrease in the number of nurses of foreign nationality working for the SNS,” the report notes. In 2006 there were 1,054, with that figure having halved a decade later.