While the left-wing blames the Government, the right-wing parties say that the issues on AIMA are cause by the previous management of Partido Socialista (PS).

Contacted by Lusa on the occasion of the second anniversary of AIMA's creation, PSD, IL, and Chega admit that the institution has many problems, but point the finger at the socialist management, which allowed the exponential increase in immigrants. At the same time, PS, Livre and CDU accuse the Government of wanting the agency to fail, through the promotion of wrong policies and lack of investment.

"It is not possible to talk about AIMA two years ago, or the current one, without talking about the whole process that led to its creation, the terrible way in which the SEF (Immigration and Borders Service) ended, with administrative agony and an inability to make effective decisions following the near destruction of the border control system itself," the Social Democrat António Rodrigues told Lusa.

The functions of the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) and the High Commission for Migration were merged into AIMA, which inherited around 400,000 pending regularisation processes, most related to expressions of interest, a resource that allowed the regularisation of foreigners in Portugal who arrived with tourist visas.

“There was no administrative machine that could handle the scale of the problem, and what we had to do was resolve the pending issues and make up for lost time,” explained the Social Democratic deputy, considering that AIMA “has a negative image for having been born flawed,” despite its “essential responsibility in people’s lives.”

Insufficient support

The Government approved a mission structure to support the regularisation and renewal of documents, but Chega considers that the oversight is not sufficient and calls for the “strengthening of the control aspect” of immigrants, with the creation of a body “with powers of migratory oversight.”

In a written response, Chega calls for a “review of family reunification criteria” and “better institutional coordination and allocation of resources,” seeking to “ensure that AIMA has human, technological, and logistical resources” adequate to its needs.

The socialist Pedro Delgado Alves considered that the Government never managed to solve the problems: AIMA “was heavily penalized by the troubled creation process, by the fact that it was born in the aftermath of the pandemic, having also inherited a very large burden of pending cases that were in the SEF,” but then, “the current government took measures that made the situation even less manageable and less explainable.”

Reactions from other parties

In statements to Lusa, Rui Rocha, from the Liberal Initiative (IL), considers that Portugal experienced “two bankruptcies, one financial with José Sócrates and another migratory,” with the “expressions of interest and the lack of control of the borders,” which led to the “failure of the administrative control model” of immigrants. The AIMA “was created with a heavy legacy that it failed to reverse” and the country has had, “from a legislative point of view, an evolution towards more restrictive laws”, in a context of various administrative and judicial problems, with the “administrative courts having more than 130,000 cases due to inability to respond”.

Paulo Muacho (Livre) recalled that the creation of the AIMA had “a positive objective”, which was to separate administrative and criminal matters.

However, “this reform was done in a way that didn't work because, from the beginning, the means for the AIMA to do its work were not given, whether human or technical resources”, stated the Livre deputy.

In a written response, the PCP recalled that it was against the extinction of the SEF and considered the creation of the AIMA “a botched process that dragged on”, and, to this day, “the conditions, means and resources have not been ensured, taking into account the competences that were assigned to it”.