Minister of the Presidency (António Leitão Amaro) held a press conference yesterday to mark one year of the migration plan. He spoke for an hour, but as usual I can’t find any mention of GVs. Seriously need to get some journalists asking questions on our behalf!
Highlights from ECO:
Leitão Amaro guarantees that “practically all expressions of interest have been decided”
Summary of expressions of interest
- Of the 446,921 pending cases, 274,000 appointments were made;
- Of these, 253,000 were attended to;
- Of these, 184,000 have already been decided (and 69,000 are awaiting a decision);
- Of these, 150,000 received a positive response [and thus 34,000 got rejected]
- “practically all the situations of expressions of interest have been decided”, with around half of the requests having been rejected.
- the Minister of the Presidency explained that the rejections concern cases in which there are previous orders from other countries that these people cannot be in the Schengen area .
- One of the tasks yet to be completed is related to CPLP titles. After having dealt with all pending expressions of interest, the mission structure has already begun to deal with these titles: of 210 thousand pending processes, 115 thousand have already been dealt with
- this AIMA operation cost the State 25 million euros , but generated 82.3 million euros in revenue (fees that the State should have already received, if the processes had been scheduled in due time), added Rui Freitas.
…plus some extra from DN:
Mission Structure has already completed 150 thousand immigrant processes
This task force had a total of 1,465 collaborators, including 843 lawyers and solicitors and 120 case decision-makers. The Government decided to extend the work until December 31st. In addition to finalizing the work in progress, this same team will renew the thousands of expired residence permits - which immigrants currently have no way of renewing.
(I posted more about what they said re: renewals here)