Last director of SEF criticizes extinction and AIMA: “It was 2 strange years”

O the last director of the Foreign and Border Service (SEF) today criticized the closure of the service in 2023 and considered that the management of migration problems remains unresolved, also regretting the creation of services in the PSP.

In an interview with the ‘podcast’ Lusa Extra on the occasion of the three years of the creation of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), which led to the extinction of the SEF and the High Commissioner for Migration (ACM), Paulo Batista acknowledged that there was a worsening of the to-dos due to the delay of the process.

“In my opinion, it was a bad decision,” commented Paulo Batista, who led the last three months of the SEF’s operation, an organism that was extinguished more than two years after the first political decision.

The “SEF maintained all its competences and responsibilities until the end, and therefore all its responsibilities, but the means, in the final stage, began to fail” and “the people themselves, in the face of the decision to extinguish the service, did not have the motivation that characterized them for years”, so thousands of to-dos were accumulated.

Months after the creation of AIMA, a PSD/CDS government took office that suspended the figure of the Manifestation of Interest, a mechanism that allowed the regularization of those who were in the country with a tourist visa as long as they had discounts made, and created a mission structure to solve almost half a million immigrants to be regularized.

“It was more the processes that came in than those that were solved” and “it did, in fact, generate a problem that AIMA eventually inherited and had to deal with, because the SEF, in the final phase, in what it could have done to solve it also did not, as the perspective was that everything would be done according to the will of the new agency that had been created, however,”, he explained.

Therefore, with regard to the delays, “there was no way to solve it, because there was a solution coming after who would actually be able to respond to the problem of the accumulation of to-does,” he recalled.

“The SEF was, for many years, the entity responsible for migration control, in its various aspects” and, after the closure, “their competences were divided into a set of entities” that “did not always dialogue well,” he said.

Therefore, the dispatch of the cases “was smaller than the new registrations that appeared”, he said

“It was two strange years”, with successive postponements and, “every time it was postponed, everything stopped and life continued”, but the “SEF had to continue its mission at the borders, in supervision, investigation, care and asylum”.

Despite the problems, the “SEF fulfilled to the end, better or worse, its mission”, defended Paul Baptist.

During the months in which he was in the management of the SEF, first as deputy director and then as director, Paulo Batista spoke to the “AIMA Governing Board, in order to try to advance the way, and some was followed, but things did not evolve” as needed, because “there was much pressure and much concern, especially in people, with what was going to be their future”

“ Each country has its own organisation and we had our own: we had a service that was the SEF, an integral service, which brought together practically all the competences related to the migratory phenomenon, from border control, the residence of foreigners in the national territory, the granting or not of asylum status, the removal of foreigners from the national territory and the documentary part, such as the granting of residence permits”, he recalled.

Then, “the situation worsened a lot, even because AIMA does its work completely away from the other bodies and there is no coordination here” with other entities, said Paulo Batista, who also criticizes the current model, with the strengthening of PSP.

The Foreign and Border Unit in the PSP, created a year ago, “may be a path, but it is not the same”, besides valuing the “persecutory part, the punitive part towards the immigrant” and “missing the aspect of the monitoring” of foreigners.

On the other hand, the lack of integration of immigrants is stressed.

“ We all know that the immigrant often lives away from what society is, often excluded. Lives to work, others live in a kind of ghettos ", in degraded neighborhoods, explained Paulo Batista.

“All of this drives the immigrant away from society and creates problems, particularly for future generations of these immigrants,” he added. “This creates stigma, difficulties that may later have negative consequences for the future.”.