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PORTUGAL
1. INVOLUNTARY RETURN
1.1 POLICY
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PORTUGAL
Portugal has in recent years quickly evolved from a traditional emigration country to a key
immigration country in Europe. This has significantly influenced the government’s approach to
migration management, which currently has three foci: control and combat irregular immigration,
encourage essential labour migration and effectively integrate legal immigrants.
Official asylum statistics in Portugal are the lowest within the EU. In 2002, Portugal received
just 180 applications for asylum, which resulted in 14 offers of asylum under the Geneva Convention
and 18 residence permits on the basis of humanitarian protection.
Despite these low statistics, Portugal has over the past decade seen a relative increase in its
number of resident foreign migrants. Within the five-year period 1996-2001, Portugal witnessed
an increase of over 100 per cent of its foreign national population from about 173,000 to over
350,000. By the end of 2003, the number of foreign nationals residing in Portugal was approximately
500,000.
The government’s approach to managing immigration during the 1990s was through amnesty
programmes, which led to the regularization of 38,000 foreign nationals in 1993 and a further
30,000 in 1996.
These measures were complemented with new legislation on asylum and the treatment of foreign
nationals, such as the 1998 Asylum law, Law Number 15/98, which replaced the 1993
Asylum Law, 1 widely criticized for being too restrictive. In the same year, Decree Law Number
244/98 regulating the Entry, Permanence, Exit and Expulsion of Foreigners from the
National Territory (Aliens Act 1998) was adopted, and further amended on 25 February 2003,
with a new immigration law of the same title, Decree Law Number 34/03 (Aliens Act 2003).
The rationale behind these recent legislative initiatives is to control and combat irregular immigration,
part of a three-pronged government approach to managing migration, as mentioned
above.
In addition to these domestic changes, the Portuguese government has made efforts to harmonize
its immigration policy and legislation with recent EU directives regulating the presence of
third-country nationals in the Schengen area. Among others, the 2003 Decree Law regulating the
Entry, Permanence, Exit and Expulsion of Foreigners in Portugal incorporates EU directives on
the responsibility of airlines that transport undocumented migrants into Portugal and the strengthening
of the penal framework to prevent the entry, movement and residence of illegal migrants.