Sorry, I was referring to the article you quoted. See above.
Article is saying AIMA is failing āBrazilians living in Portugalā¦ā (so, citizens already) who need āā¦to renew their residence permits in the country.ā
Wouldnāt it just be great to process in the order received?
lmao, this is exactly what my lawyers were saying would happen. Itās basically just a re-branded SEF, no one should expect any different, itās all political spin.
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Iād sign, letās get it started
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Iād sign.
Question: I am a GV investor. Now that Portugal has recently changed its GV investment laws (making it more expensive and harder to do overall) wonāt there be less GV investments coming in, hopefully making it less clogged up? Too optimistic?
Itās relative. The applications will definitely decrease compared to the end of 2021 and the end of the real estate option (October 2023). But I foresee the demand going back to normal levels. The backlog is already projected to last for 18 months, so any hope of a quick resolution is a fantasy. But as I have posted before, the current state of affairs isnāt really that bad. The baseline approval time is 16-18 months - this is best I think you can expect. Currently we are at around 24 months. In the grand scheme of things, itās not that much outside the normal. In other words, much ado about nothing. Aside from the applicants, no one wants this to be a fast process. Not the EU, not Portugal and not the USA Treasury Dept. If you want fast, go to a Carribean island and apply there.
One important thing is: supply/demand.
With all bullsh$tting stuffs of SEF and how much the portuguese government disrespect their own timeline, the numbers of GV investors still increase. Therefore, why should the government need to speedup? In fact, they could slow down even more and still have more investors.
I applied in April 2020 and got pre-approval in June 2020. During 2019 -2020, all people I knew, they all got their pre-approval within 6-10 weeks. Now people get pre-approval at 18th months and it becomes normal. So if the govt officials read the statistic, they wonder themselve, should we slow down even more? 
They only respect to their own rule and timeline if the GV investors drop significantly (letās say a decrement of 90-95%).
I was looking through the PT government statistics on immigration in the last year. We know that there is a backlog of 327,000 applications. But this number is hard to understand during a year when automatic renewals were in place. So this number must be largely NEW applications for residence.
And when compared to the total number of new residents from 2021, it is clear that Portugal became VERY popular in 2022-2023 period.
The government just announced that in the last year only 2,600 D8 were granted which is surprisingly low. Which leads me to believe the large number of the new applicants are economic migrants seeking work in Portugal or those from Portuguese speaking countries namely Brazil.
Assuming there are 400,000 temporary residents in Portugal and AIMA/IRN eliminates auto renewal, then this is going to go from bad to worse. Regardless of how optimistic the government might be, I do not see them getting rid of auto renewals in general.
Having said that, the competency for renewal of ARI has been retained by AIMA so it is quite possible that this carve out was created so that in-person renewals would be required for the former ARI permits. Except that AIMA does NOT retain competency of D2 renewals so it has created an unusual system where renewals will be handled by different agencies depending on the stage of application.
Is it possible that AIMA will take it upon themselves to promptly and efficiently resolve the ARI renewal situation? Yes, but my experience indicates otherwise.
327 thousands are new applications, for sure. In portuguese news those are mentioned as āpedidos da residĆŖnciaā.
There are also 200-400 thousands of family reunifications who did not supply their applications yet because could not schedule an appointment.
Renewals unsolved are so from the October 2023.
Does anyone know how to track the monthly approval data for the GV after AIMA took over SEF?
The first official AIMA stats would be expected for November, and thus released in early December. Keep an eye out for the mid-monthly articles on IMI Daily - they do an amazing job at graphing GV stats. Hereās their latest October analysis of Septemberās data. Their analysis of October (still SEF) should be out around the 13th of this month.
In the meantime, for a āreal-timeā view of any signs of life at SEF/AIMA I keep a close watch for new entries on the GV tracking calendar hosted on this site. Sadly not all 8,000+ of us in the GV pile are updating it, so itās an incomplete picture. Get the word out to your fellow GV applicants so it can be more accurate! 
All stats are still available at SEF site:
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āMeet the new boss, same as the old boss.ā
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If there will be some one changes prioritization, we will see next month officially. However since the beginning of this month, there is not any update on our calendar. There is not any single processed application for pre-approval. They perhaps need some time to change some algorithms.
I do not expect any change in the following 3-4 months at least. Increasing capacity may help somehow but it also requires some times for it.
I hope next year prioritization changes would happen and capacity increase would happen as well.
I have no idea how you are so optimistic
I think we will have another 2-3 months go by for December 2021 applications and then like 1-2 years for June 2022.
I doubt June 2022 is anywhere close to Dec 2021. Even 5-6 months of normal application levels ā which we shouldnt assume, because Decās craziness was due to people rushing to beat a rule change, implying the program became less enticing in 2022 ā should be far, FAR below Dec 2021 application levels. It just doesnt make sense for applications to increase after the program got āworseā (aka less affordable). A lot of potential applicants were probably priced out by the Jan 2022 rule changes.
Our lawyers, for one data point, said in their experience there were fewer applications in all of 2022 than there were in Dec 2021.
This might be the last area in which I am optimistic regarding ARI. I have no idea when Dec 2021 applications will be done processing, but I do not expect 2022 to continue the same nightmare.
It will be an entirely new nightmare!
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If our crowdsourced database is a good sample of the full population of applicants, there were about half as many applications Jan-June 2022 as there were in just Dec. 2021. Database shows 47 entries for Jan-June 2022 versus 94 entries for Dec. 2021.
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Jan-May 2022 is not a good reference as the SEF online portal was not accepting any new applications. The system opened again around mid June 2022.
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Even so, if he included June, most of the Jan-June demand would be accounted for. (If our data is representative.)
By some accounts, all PT law firms were submitting applications like crazy in June. Just nowhere near Dec 2021 levels.