Appeal to justice by immigrants shows “disfunctional” rule of law

A jurist Ana Rita Gil today considered the Portuguese migration legislation excessively restrictive and regretted the judicialization of the relationship of immigrants with public administration, which understands as signs of a dysfunctional rule of law.

In an interview with Lusa on the occasion of the three years of creation of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), which is marked on Thursday, the professor of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon criticized the lack of response of the administration to immigrants, which leads them to move lawsuits to force decisions.

“ When we have to appeal to the court to ask the administration to decide, this demonstrates a deeply dysfunctional rule of law,” said Ana Rita Gil

On the three years of AIMA's creation, the lawyer praised the effort to regulate half a million foreigners who had pending proceedings, but regrets that the system is not open to users themselves.

AIMA is “the only public service in Portugal that does not have a service line, just a general mail that is a black hole in which no one responds,” he said.

According to the lawyer, immigrants are resident in the Portuguese territory and are in an irregular situation due to “problems created by AIMA itself”, resulting in “they cannot enroll in a college, they cannot open an account in the bank and, ultimately, they can be expelled to their country of origin”.

“A thing so common” with a regular contact channel “does not exist”, which then leads to an increase in judicial proceedings, clogging the administrative courts, it went ahead.

Ana Rita Gil recalled that “there are 85,000 pending cases and what the “Administrative Court orders [in most cases] is AIMA to decide”, which constitutes a “sign of shame” for the Portuguese public administration.

“With regard to regulation, we saw a great turn in 2024, with the first mandate of the PSD government and CDS-PP, which marked everything that would be the trajectory from then on,” said the specialist in Human Rights, Asylum and Immigration and Constitutional Law.

The jurist stated that she agreed to the end of the manifestation of interest, considering that “it was a necessary measure”, since it allowed “in good rigor a permanent regularization of immigrants” and “it made a call effect for illegal immigration”, increasing the flow of regularization requests that led to half a million to-dos.

The manifestation of interest was withdrawn from the law in June 2024, ending the legal resource that allowed the regularization in national territory of holders of tourist or student visas, provided they had discounts for a year.

However, after the first measures, the government has “not only a regulatory purpose, but above all a restrictive purpose” in the management of immigrants, by limiting reunification, changing the nationality law or setting rules for return even more restrictive than the European regulation.

“Portugal was an exception in the European panorama regarding a perspective of generosity in immigration and nationality law. In 2024 we became more moderate and from 2025 we became restrictive”, explained Ana Rita Gil.

The increase in immigrants, from 421,000 in 2017 to almost 1.6 million in 2025, “is related to the manifestations of interest and possibilities of regularization that existed in the country,” he said.

To correct this situation, “Portugal wanted to go a little further than what was minimally necessary and all this was a clear, autonomous option of the Portuguese legislator,” said Ana Rita Gil, considering that the legal amendments also contributed to the pressure of public opinion against immigrants.

“ The democratic legislator must know how to listen to the people, but it has as its limit the Constitution and there are points where, clearly, it has gone beyond what would be admissible, even if the people want it ", as is the case of limitations to family reunification or "amending the law of nationality on request".

In Europe, there has been a security tendency since 2015, which has only begun to feel in Portugal “because there has been a party that has elected the cause of migration as one of its flags”.

Since then, said Ana Rita Gil, “some more populist leaders have inflamed themselves with this idea that Europe was being invaded by immigrants, against the ideal population of a homogeneous Europe.”.

Ana Rita Gil argued that in the face of this discourse, good leaders should “calm up and rationalize” rather than adopt “very primitive reactions that further exalt the spirits, with a kind of selective forgetfulness of their own history” of emigration.

“ If we are going to read the descriptions that the French made of the Portuguese who went ‘the leap’, as illegal immigrants, were absolutely frightening and similar to descriptions that we see, for example, of the Indian community that is here”, he recalled.