The President of the Republic stressed on Tuesday that the new legal regime for the entry and stay of foreigners approved by the government is temporary and that he made it public in the face of a “serious situation with bottlenecks” in the processes.
After attending the seventh Euro-African Forum, held at the Carcavelos campus of the New University of Lisbon, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was questioned about a meeting he held on Sunday with immigrant associations, who said they had heard from him that he would fight for the return of the expression of interest mechanism.
“At that time, I had the opportunity to say that my position regarding the law I published was the understanding that there was a serious situation with bottlenecks in the regularization of migrants, and therefore the temporary regime was justified,” he began, responding to the head of state.
“A temporary regime means a temporary regime,” Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa emphasized at the time.
At the beginning of June, the President of the Republic published a decree-law approved by the Council of Ministers, which changed the legal regime for the entry and stay of foreigners in the country, abolishing residence permits based on the expression of interest presented by immigrants.
At that time, he argued that it was necessary to stop the “snowball” of immigration processes and respond to the thousands of people that had accumulated, thereby justifying the immediate publication of the decree-law in question.
“As for the immediate future, it is wise not to let the snowball continue to grow, because if we are not chasing losses, that is, trying to organize hundreds of thousands of people and at the same time enter, even before the rest of the current regime – more,” he said.
For Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa at the time, it was “a matter of common sense” to try not to put pressure “in terms of increasing the number of people on that machine.”
“We need to quickly resolve the thousands, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who have been waiting for this for years. It is urgent, and there are other measures that will supposedly make the machine work to make this possible. We will see,” he said at the time.