And a major annoyance to those unfortunates who actually applied for one.
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Yum tech people arguing over semantics. NOW this is a real forum! 
I think we can just put it down to ARI being the lowest of low priorities. Everyone else gets their cards relatively instantly.
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Average over 50 files on Aima per day.
Soon 50 will become 500… T-virus from AIMA corporation will be wide spread all over Portugal 
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Sooner or later this chaos will only be resolved by some sort of amnesty surely.
Mass temporary approvals with more scrutiny at renewal.
Otherwise, the only approvals will be actioned by lawsuit and AIMA will collapse.
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I suggest that if someone is waiting without filing lawsuits now, he should consider seriously to take up actions. Because when this T-virus is 100% wide spread, 2 months lawsuits now might become 2-3 years in the future. Or the court will not accept filing anymore…
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So sad… but so true… 
[quote=“garrett, post:88, topic:61700”]
You summed things up beautifully. This country & its people (the Portuguese) are truly lovely. I consider it an honor to be living here as an Expat Brit.
So there are delays, but there are lots to do here in the meanwhile. I have waited eighteen months for a biometric residency card after being promised a maximum wait of three weeks.
Okay I am not a GV applicant & have accessed all the offerings on offer through the freebie route although I have purchased an old farmhouse in Central Portugal. No doubt when the AIMA become aware of my plight they will access their inherited database & send off my card pronto.
In the meanwhile I shall be working my way through 150 hours of online language learning in order to obtain Portuguese citizenship. Now that’s something you GV bods will not have to do.
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GV citizenship applicants are also required to have A2 language levels.
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Where is this online learning?
The same publication that reported “400 thousand processes inherited from SEF” at the end of April is now saying “More than half a million people are waiting to be granted nationality in Portugal”
Workers’ Union says they’re short-staffed, FWIW…
the Union of Registry and Notary Workers says… “There is a shortage of 242 registrars and 1691 registry officers, which means a deficit of more than 34% of the staff needed.”
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New government is investigating the extinction of SEF.
New govt already abolished the “mais habitação”. Now the role and objective of AIMA are being questioned. Maybe SEF will be recovered again . Sound fictionally surreal but who knows…
If you think of it something like AIMA is a classification system. You want something between infinitely difficult immigration (easy for AIMA: do nothing!) and infinitely easy immigration (easy for AIMA: tell the citizenship people to give every applicant citizenship!)
You can easily reduce your workload by relaxing the classification slightly, with the main downside being that you might let in undesirables.
In effect, the automatic renewals and automatic legal extensions do exactly this. They save AIMA labor while potentially letting people remain who, if their records were checked more carefully, would be kicked out.
I don’t know. This is an inefficient way of executing government policy. If a government has a policy to control certain classes of immigration then it just needs to enact a law that does so and follow through that law to implementation. Same the other way, if certain classes of immigration are in favour then it enacts a law to articulate this and follows through with the implementation.
It’s the job of the civil service to implement government policies (haha, well, in theory) so squeezing resources at the implementation phase to effect unwritten policy outcomes (fewer immigrants of certain classes) seems like an inefficient and unnecessary method given the ability of a government to enact laws.
There could be an argument that squeezing implementation resources or implementing a “go slow” policy could be a deliberate act on the part of civil servants who do not agree with government immigration policies and wish to control the outcome themselves irrespective of the laws enacted by the government of the day. I’d find that more credible because we see this all the time in some supposed Western democracies.
I suspect it’s not so much scheming as SNAFU:
- “What’s our boss want us to do today?”
- “Not sure, who is our boss today?”
- “It was Costa and his Socialist buddies, but then his enemies dug up some dodgy stuff and he resigned.”
- “But there’s a new boss, no?”
- “Montenegro, yeah - but without a majority… hard to say what he can achieve, or how long he’ll be around. So far he’s mostly just pointing out how bad the previous government was. Oh yeah and changing the government logo back to the old one.”
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All I hear is: more delay. Delaying-to-investigate-the delay delaying.
If the citizenship clock really does start before pre-approval, its pretty tempting to hope they take a couple years to resolve the issues. But then again I WANT IT NOW!
New level of AIMA madness, first spotted by @pichki.k here.
Skimming through one of the original sources (Notícias ao Minuto), people are rightly thinking it might be an internet scam, but seems real.
Left Bloc summons AIMA to the AR. "It is failing", 9-May 2024
At issue is a news item reported today by Antena 1 which reports that immigrants with regularization processes pending at AIMA are receiving messages indicating that from now on it will be mandatory to pay fees before being served at the agency’s counters, in an amount that has increased from 90 to 400 euros and which must be paid within ten days, under penalty of seeing their regularization processes canceled.
AIMA pede a imigrantes 400 euros em 10 dias. Governo promete "resposta", 9-May 2024
An official source from the office of the Minister of the Presidency indicated that it had become aware of the measure this Thursday, having highlighted that the Government will present a “different response”, which will integrate the action plan that the Executive is preparing.
…According to the entity, this procedure was based on a “regulatory decree (no. 1/2024) of January 17, 2024, approved by the previous Government, and which ordered new fees to be applied to the processes then pending”.
As usual the talk here is of the hundreds of thousands who came to work in Portugal, and now are looking to become regularised. How this might apply to GVs, nobody but us seems to think about.
The talk of increasing the fee from $90 to $400 makes it sound irrelevant to GV?
Think so. Our process has us paying some initial fees in advance of biometrics if I recall (at pre approval was it?) already.
Yes, €533 just to apply in 2021