Task force.
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Why don’t they ask future investors to invest AIMA? This organization clearly is desperately in need of more employees, good IT resources, outsourcing 400,000 applications…
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So the Parliament should add one GV method, namely investing at least €500,000 to improve AIMA’s operations
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Quite a detailed interview in DN with António Leitão Amaro, Minister of the Presidency, signposting the announcements due on Monday. Talk of tightening up the immigration system and trying to fix AIMA:
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From the Expresso (Semanário).
Behind a paywall - herewith a pdf.
Apparently, if one estimates pending applications - ie GV, students, family reunification - there are close to 600,000 pending cases to be dealt with…
Debandada de funcionários na agência para as migrações. Expresso 31-maio-2024.pdf (375.4 KB)
Lets see what “solutions” Monday brings.
Great interview.
Immediate thoughts:
Someone let their server room overheat!? Apparently that was the cause of the airport systems going down for a few days a bit ago. Ridiculous incompetence. It must be worse than we thought even
Generally, António seems pretty pro immigration and that’s good. I wish him luck
In the pdf file it says many pending request in 2017. Moreover one pending from 2008 and one pending from 2009 
15-16 years waiting.
Before they made excuses from Covid and War. But pending requests from 2017 or 2008 are an obvious evidence showing that simply sef/aima just did not care and government basically did not want to solve the problem. Very likely the problem will never be solved.
I’m optimistic that the new government may do it. We’ll see if they’re any more effective
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“Unique opportunity to invest in government fixer-upper. Miserable staff, Soviet-era IT, and angry protests right on your doorstep. Call now for prospectus (please note, calls will not be answered)”
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Agree. The new government seems to be acknowledging that they’ve inherited a huge mess, and the ball is in their court to get the processes working again.
It’s heartening to hear the Minister of the Presidency quoting process stats (and pointing out the lack of them!). He does seem to have an appreciation of the problems.
His focus certainly is not on GVs (quote below), but let’s hope Monday’s “future of immigration policy in Portugal” proposals offer some hope to us as well.
“…it would make sense to have positive discrimination, more favorable treatment for immigrants who come from CPLP countries, for reasons of cultural proximity and linguistics that makes social integration easier.”
PS.
To be fair to AIMA, this incompetence happens in other countries too:
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust warned in 2018 about datacentre cooling issues, outage report shows | Computer Weekly
“…on 19 July 2022… UK temperatures hit a record-breaking high of 40°C… led to two datacentres used to host the Trust’s 371 legacy IT systems overheating and malfunctioning. The two sites, one located at Guy’s Hospital and the other at St Thomas’, were designed to act as backups for each other in the event of an IT failure…”
At least he has put in effort to understand the problem in detail and gauged the quantum of effort needed to resolve it. The silence on GV both from the interviewer and the minister is acceptable considering the proportion of such applications is small. But if any inferences can be made from his statements, this gentleman would classify GV applicants as the kind of differentiated migrants Portugal needs. Even if I am wrong, judging by his words, Portugal needs to be welcoming to the applicants already in process viz a viz the state drafted policy of the time. I am ok with any scrutiny of documents and credentials, what I am not ok with is the blatant violation of committments pertaining to timeline of granting visa.
In my case, even judiciary has failed me. I am 100% sure any statistical analysis on rulings of administrative courts of Portugal pertaining to GV would draw a blank. Only my lords know which application to be considered urgent and which ones not- maybe they just toss a coin or roll a dice. And such a wastage of judicial resources…one outcome does not form precedent for other similar cases and neither cases are clubbed together to propel government, agencies to submit a holistic response or instruct them to deploy resources for same.
SEF (and now AIMA) has been a mess for the years we have had to deal with them. Changes in laws to encourage immigration (highly skilled, CPLP and investment-related GV) have placed an intolerable and unsustainable caseload burden on under-resourced, under-staffed departments (AIMA and IRN).
GV is a minute fraction of the total volume of immigration processing, although GV gains (or has gained) sometimes from the urgency voiced by others.
Solutions could include automated processing and reduction/elimination of repetitive processes (eg fingerprints). This implies official acceptance of the security risks that automation will bring.
It is not clear what other short term solutions are possible. Increased staff? Need hiring and training, plus budget approvals. This is difficult to imagine as a quick fix. If the new Government is, or wants to be, more effective - it will need to think of solutions within the existing budget.
One change that could help is to change the GV law to allow local embassies to process applications as well as biometrics.
It looks like embassies have a good handle on initial processing of D7/D8 and the processing time is reasonable so the framework is already in place.
It would also reduce complexities for travel and the need for a visa for those who need one for biometrics under the existing structure.
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…or use VFS extra-territorial offices, like lots of other countries do.
But for AIMA to farm anything out - to PT lawyers (as already proposed), PT embassies, VFS, whomever - first they have to get a grip on all the applications they have and what stage they’re at. Adding more chefs to a kitchen that’s on fire will just create more confusion.
As I posted a few days ago, right now AIMA’s got a “lack of a database that indicates the status of each process” and “it is not possible to identify in a simple and reliable way the number of pending cases.”
Just hire some of the immigrants as AIMA workers. Surely of all places, Portugal isn’t suffering nearly as much from a lack of labor force as other countries.
Assuming 10 EUR/hr (which to my understanding is a fairly good starting office job wage in Portugal, please correct me if I’m wrong) and 35 hour work weeks for AIMA staff, that’s 350 EUR/week or 18200 EUR/yr, double it for overhead/benefits/etc and it’s still 36400 EUR/year, you could hire about 275 new workers for only 10 million euro. Assuming each can process four cases a day (seems reasonable to me, but if we have info please share), that’s 1100 cases a day extra, or 280 thousand a year.
With some automation and efficiency improvements I don’t see why that couldn’t be doubled or more. Or just pay less, maybe my numbers are off, or spend 20 or 30 million euro on it to blast through the backlog quickly
(of course, this assumes they first get their data organized - lots of people doing data entry is not an uncommon setup though!)
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Nuclear option: just cancel the applications of people who applied in-country since that seems to be the majority of the queue, and it probably isn’t doctors and lawyers awaiting decisions there…
If you just hand out residency to anyone who shows up, you will always have an application queue problem, and probably others as well. Maybe filter the applicants a little, like every other country on the planet.
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This practical ruthlessness (in business and governance) is what most leaderships lack these days.
Not really a serious idea due to rights violations…they COULD disallow new applications like that, however, without harming anyones rights.
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I normally wouldn’t reply to someone I’ve blocked but your suggestion is monstrous @ohbee
Hundreds of thousands of people that simply want a chance at a better life have uprooted themselves and already had their lives tremendously disrupted because of Portuguese government incompetence, and you want to throw them under the bus?
It is not difficult to process lots of immigrants, the US managed it back in the Ellis Island era and before, with modern technology it should be trivial.
To suggest the solution for a small number of rich people to get their visas processed is that we should screw over the poor is exactly the kind of thing that makes regular people hate the kind of people that would post here.
Disgusting
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