DN published an interview yesterday (14th) with the Deputy Secretary of State for the Presidency, Rui Freitas. AIMA falls under his remit.
Not a single mention of GV (surprise!). Hopefully we’ll benefit from the extra resources being put on, but also note the strong preference for CPLP immigrants.
Highlights:
- [of the planned extra 350 bods for the 1-year ‘Mission Structure,’ about 25% are in place] - Today, we have around 90 more people in the Mission Structure, who are not only AIMA staff.
- Which ten municipalities have already signed the protocol? [to have new AIMA service points] - I would prefer not to disclose it yet, but the coming weeks will be full of new developments and we will continue to provide information.
- we used to have access to the SEF report on the number of foreigners in Portugal. It has not been published yet, but it will be… - It will be in the next few days… but we are talking about data from 2023 that do not account for the 400,000 pending cases, because in relation to those, which we inherited from the previous Government, there is no information, no statistics on what we have there. That is why this is an urgent matter for us. [Later in the interview he would/could not answer how many people have been and will be regularised in 2024, despite being asked a few different ways.]
- renewal of expired residence cards. When will the online portal be open for these automatic renewals? - There will be new developments in this entire process very soon, as it is at a very advanced stage of completion. In June, we extended the validity of these documents… We also want to transfer renewals to AIMA. Including IRN does not make much sense to us. But the IRN is still responsible for renewals. As part of this broader restructuring, it will be transferred to AIMA. Very quickly, we will also have to deal with this legacy
- AIMA phones are not answered and the emails are not replied to. How do you plan to solve this? - The competition for a call centre is at an advanced stage and will be held in the next few days.
- Brazil, with over 200 million inhabitants, Angola 35 million, Mozambique 32 million. This is for a country [Portugal] with 10 million inhabitants. … Are our public services, for example, able to respond to this potential influx of these immigrants? - …for this government, the CPLP will be discriminated in a positive way. We believe that a common language and a common past greatly facilitates the family network that already exists in Portugal. … Without people there is no economy. And we really need and will give priority to the CPLP.