Portugal is ‘open-air prison’ for migrants, says immigration group

OVIEDO, Spain

The head of Portugal’s largest immigrant association said Monday that the country has become an “open-air prison” for thousands of migrants facing unresolved legal cases and constant threats of deportation.

Marking one year since Portugal announced new measures to limit the arrival of migrants, Timoteo Macedo, president of Solidariedade Imigrante (Immigrant Solidarity), offered a grim assessment of the government’s migration policies.

“We are in a state of panic, a state of despair, for thousands of migrants living under threat of expulsion,” Macedo told Portuguese news agency Lusa.

He warned that the environment of fear is feeding organized crime networks and unscrupulous actors who exploit legal loopholes and ineffective hiring schemes, such as the so-called Green Lane for Immigration, which he says only serves to “charge more to those who want to come.”

He said that the document renewal processes “do not work,” with many migrants unable to travel to their countries of origin or complete family reunification processes.

“Today, Portugal has extremely severe policies toward migrants,” Macedo said, accusing the government of showing little interest in improving public services for foreign residents.

Reversing some of EU's most liberal migration policies

Portugal was once seen as a welcoming country with some of Europe’s most progressive migration policies, Macedo said. However, the Action Plan for Migration, launched last year, introduced 41 measures aimed at limiting the arrival of new migrants.

One major change was ending a system that allowed migrants to regularize their status, even on a tourist visa, if they had contributed to social security for 12 months.

Between the time this system was enacted by the Socialist government in 2017 and the end of 2024, the number of foreign residents in Portugal nearly quadrupled from 420,000 to 1.6 million, according to an April report from the migration agency AIMA.

Antonio Leitao Amaro, the country’s conservative immigration minister, called this “the biggest demographic change” ever experienced and said the previous government allowed “irresponsible, uncontrolled immigration.”

The AIMA report also found that since the new migration measures were passed, the flow of foreign citizens seeking residence dropped by around 59%.

However, Macedo said people will "never stop fighting for their lives, and so they will enter in other ways.” Now, the absence of mechanisms to regularize their stays “feeds exploitation and modern slavery,” he added.