This will have the complete opposite effect.
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If you really wanted immigrants to leave Portugal, then you should grandfather existing resident permit holders and applicants. Once they get their citizenship based on the extremely high emigration rate in Portugal, a lot of them are likely to just leave for another EU country. Yes it’s unfortunate that immigrants come to Portugal just to get citizenship and then move to another EU country, but now you will have all the immigrants locked into the country, with limited mobility to leave and difficulty in maintaining and working due to residence permit issues. You’ve basically trapped a huge swath of people in the country for another decade or more because let’s be honest, AIMA is never getting fixed.
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Every prospective high-paid, well-educated immigrant in tech, entrepreneurship or another career/domain that can bring a lot of value to a country, will now just go somewhere else. Everybody with those credentials has other options, plenty of other places they can go to and none of them are going to be willing to pay taxes for more than a decade to receive dysfunctional services, a cyclic period every 2 years where they can’t leave the country and return easily for 1 year while AIMA renews their permit, and the general ire of the public and the state who have demonized these people and used them as a scapegoat. No more of these people will choose Portugal, why would anyone do a PHD in a Portuguese university now, contribute to research and development when they have the state actively fighting to kick them out and make their life as difficult as possible?
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Now that all those high-paid and qualified individuals who could have potentially brought a lot of value to the country are going to leave, you are stuck with low-paid, unqualified migrant labor and less educated immigrants, essentially people who don’t have a choice. People who have no other options because no other country is likely to accept them, people who would happily wait 10-15 years because the situation in an EU country is miles better than the situation for them back in their own countries.
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A country lives by its reputation. It’s one thing to change citizenship laws without grandfathering existing residents, it’s another thing to make people wait 5 years for a residence permit, then purposefully change the law protecting immigrants from the dysfunctional AIMA wait times while simultaneously changing the citizenship laws. For someone who has been in the country for years paying taxes and contributing, it’s just insulting. The government has every right to change the citizenship laws, no immigrant is entitled to citizenship in 5 years if the public and government wants to change it, but to not implement grandfathering and then specifically cut the section of the law that protects people from AIMA is a pretty shocking move. Not only is it shocking, but its dehumanizing. No immigrant should feel entitled to citizenship, but every immigrant who pays taxes, and in some cases have donated 1,000,000 euros to a cultural institution in order to receive a residence permit, should feel entitled to due process, a functioning court system, a functioning timeline, and a functioning mechanism to preserve what little dignity is left. Instead, four years after donating 1,000,000 euros, the immigrant is told that rich people have been left for last in the same way a student who forgot to do their homework makes up a shitty last minute excuse for their teacher. But after years of seeing how things work, that seems to just be how things are done, do a crappy job, and then pretend that was the plan all along.
