In Portugal, a country with a native population of less than ten million, the immigrant population had risen to over one million in 2023. In 2024, the figure is bound to rise even further. Among the foreign population living in Portugal, according to official figures from the country’s border service AIMA and statistics aggregator PORDATA, one in three suffer from extreme poverty or social exclusion. This is the sombre reality of contemporary Portugal’s migratory frenzy, yet the Left seems wholly unmoved by it.
Portugal is Europe’s immigration haven. The Iberian country grants residence permits more easily than any other of its Schengen Area peers. This stems partially from a generous policy directed to immigrants originating from former imperial possessions such as Cape Verde, Guinea, Brazil, and Angola. But Eurocratic migratory enthusiasm has also helped. Following the Brussels-led Migration Pact, Lisbon granted Portuguese nationality to more than half a million foreign-born residents, including both speakers and non-speakers of the Portuguese language. Official figures further reveal that half of those immigrants are men under the age of 45, 75% of whom are from Portuguese-speaking countries or Asian states, but with a growing number of migrants from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. As is common throughout Europe, the vast majority of the inbound are poorly educated and destined for lesser, menial, and low-paying jobs.
People are increasingly fed up. Only a few years ago there was barely any talk of immigration, with the matter excluded to the unsavoury fringes of the political spectrum, but now most Portuguese think the issue is of fundamental importance. This discomfort led thousands of concerned, angry patriots to take to the streets on September 29th in a demonstration organised by the right-wing, national-conservative CHEGA party. The event followed the refusal of the president of the republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, to discuss CHEGA leader André Ventura’s demands for a referendum on further immigration.
Contrary to the media narrative, the demonstration that brought thousands of Portuguese to the streets was not an exhibition of mass racism or xenophobia, or even against the presence of immigrants in Portugal. Rather, it was a rightful outpouring of indignation against migratory chaos, the deregulation of immigration laws, and the baffling lack of political will to solve a problem which has worsened since 2017, and which has remained unsolved even after a new centre-right, EPP-aligned government took charge months ago.
The situation spiraled out of control after António Costa—then Portugal’s PM, and now president of the European Council—revolutionised the immigration system. Until August 2017, residence permits in Portugal were granted only upon presentation of an employment contract and a record of tax contributions. This was a reasonable—if insufficient—way of ensuring that immigrants would be able to make a living in Portugal. However, against the advice of the border service (the now defunct Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras), the far Left (Left Bloc) instead proposed allowing immigrants to reside in Portugal by merely registering themselves with Social Security and presenting a ‘labour contract promise.’ The new measures were enacted by the Socialist government with the votes of the far-left parties, giving rise to a whole industry of false contracts. The results were booming human trafficking networks and the entry of hundreds of thousands of illegal workers, hostages to schemes akin to modern-day slavery. At the same time, the new rules led to a significant increase in regularisation requests for which SEF, now renamed AIMA, is unable to respond.
Indeed, one of the most tragic and readily-felt consequences of mass migration in Portugal is a general collapse of public services. This is the case in schools, in which the number of migrant pupils has increased by 160% in just five years to 140,000. Such numbers aggravate the lack of teachers and non-teaching staff, as well as the lack of equipment and infrastructure. These problems are accumulating and forcing the concentration of students in the classroom, with severe consequences for the overall quality of education.
When it comes to healthcare, the challenges are similar. Portugal’s National Healthcare Service is crumbling after decades of underinvestment, insufficient numbers of staff, inadequate facilities, and now a rapidly rising number of users. The country now counts 1.5 million people, or 15% of the population, as lacking a general practitioner. The crushing load of patients who come to hospitals every day leads to the systematic closure of services due to a lack of equipment and professionals. There are no beds, no doctors, and no quality of life to those overwhelmed professionals who stubbornly remain in service. Yet the number of patients continues to rise unabated. Between February and April of this year alone, 36,000 additional people registered with the National Healthcare System.
Apart from hospitals, most public institutions in Portugal suffer from an increasingly intolerable overload of users. The shortage of professionals makes it impossible to effectively respond to patients, yet all the pro-migration Left says is “Hire more staff.” This is a classic case of nebulous ideology colliding with cold, hard reality. Even if Portugal’s financial situation may have markedly improved in recent years, the country’s budget remains constrained, debt levels are high, and tax rates are astronomical. Hiring more civil servants, however, would mean increasing public spending by paying for new salaries and accepting the reorganisation of numerous public institutions. Yet, the current centre-right government, like previous ones, is already facing an older and more acute problem: the unfreezing of careers in the case of teachers, and decent pay raises for health and other professionals already in service. Portugal’s meagre resources are insufficient to do both.
The Portuguese Left has long claimed that immigrants contribute more to the national interest than they receive. There are even those who come up with figures that seem to come out of an ingenious magic act. But all we have to do is look at the fact that immigrants to Portugal are mostly unskilled workers who earn minimum wages, if not below the minimum. They are often seasonal, precarious labourers, and it’s easy to see that all it takes is a trip to the hospital with a few tests or medical treatments, and the Portuguese state will already be spending a lot more on that individual immigrant than he contributed to the economy. Such arithmetic is hardly complex; yet it seems woefully distant from public policy considerations. A relatively simple surgery easily costs the NHS many tens of thousands of euros. However, the 11% that the typical immigrant deducts from his minimum wage is not much more than 100 euros. Now add to this all the time spent on unemployment benefits or other social support when, inevitably, this worker becomes unemployed. The numbers speak for themselves.
The Portuguese Left has also made the recurring claim that immigrants are absolutely necessary to do the work that the Portuguese ‘don’t want’ to do. The irony here lies in the fact that they manage to say this without realising that this argument undermines all the humanism that they claim to be behind their intentions. Machines are also absolutely necessary to do the work that used to be done by hand and that required physical effort that we no longer want to do. The difference here is that immigrants are not machines. They are human beings. Yet the faux humanitarians of the Left seem content to treat them as mere factors of production.
All too often, these fellow human beings lack acceptable conditions at every level. Genuinely caring individuals could hardly look many of these immigrants in the eye and tell them come. Come where—and, indeed, for what? If coming here means being faced with living conditions that are all too often intolerable, such supposed humanitarianism is not only hypocritical, but also perverse.
Yet a sinister, authoritarian alliance between the progressive, urban Left and an egotistical entrepreneurial class is conspiring to prevent the Portuguese from engaging in that most important of national conversations. As violence and disorder spread freely, schools and hospitals implode, and picturesque, quintessentially Portuguese villages lose all sense of uniqueness, homeliness, and community, rightly concerned citizens are being arrogantly told to shut up and accept becoming foreigners in their country.
And yet, as vast areas of Portugal find themselves transformed beyond recognition by a seemingly unstoppable movement of people, with major cities and villages alike taken over by foreign populations, the locals don’t merely have the right to protest—they have a duty to themselves, their country, and their children to make their voices heard. On October 4th, as the left-wing, globalist press was still pulling itself together from the successful CHEGA protests for a popular referendum on immigration, the far-left argued instead for a vote on the abolition of bullfights. As much as this writer might be critical of that age-old Iberian tradition, one is still surprised that the Left might consider the issue worthy of a plebiscite while denying the people the right to freely decide the future demographic makeup of the nation—indeed, on the question of whether or not the Portuguese, a 1,000-year-old people and nation, should remain in possession of their own country, culturally, ethnically, and religiously. On this, perhaps the most important political issue of our generation, André Ventura is entirely right: we must trust democracy and let the people decide for themselves.
