Legalisation applications for almost 34,000 foreigners rejected
Cabinet office minister António Leitão Amaro said on Monday that a thousand notifications of voluntary departure have already been issued.
More than 33,000 foreigners in Portugal have had their applications for legalisation rejected by the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) and may be ordered to leave the country voluntarily, the government has announced.
“We had 18,000 rejections, now there are almost 34,000. Of these, we are in the order of a thousand where notifications [of voluntary departure] have already been issued”, said Cabinet office minister António Leitão Amaro on Monday evening at the Government headquarters in Lisbon.
At a press conference on the resolution of pending cases at AIMA and the first year of the Action Plan for Migration, which lasted about an hour and a half, the minister said that the process “began to accelerate” last week because it is “in the process of semi-automatic issuance”.
“[The process] is accelerating and all of these [more than] 33,000 — unless there is a reason (…) — will receive an order to leave the country voluntarily”, said Leitão Amaro, adding that AIMA is “in the process of issuing around 2,000 notifications per day”.
In early May, AIMA began by notifying 18,000 foreign citizens, a number that has now almost doubled. “This notification, under the Portuguese system, allows for voluntary abandonment and only leads to coercive abandonment after a new procedure”, said the minister.
At issue are 33,983 rejections, most of which relate to Indian citizens (13,466).
Of the total 184,059 cases decided, there were also 5,386 rejections of Brazilian citizens, 3,750 from Bangladesh, 3,279 Nepalese, 3,005 Pakistanis, 236 Colombians, 1,054 Algerians, 234 Venezuelans, 180 Argentinians, 603 Moroccans and 2,790 of other nationalities.
According to the government, this represents a rejection rate of 18.5%, with 150,076 cases concluded.
