MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazilians flock into Portugal for the fourth straight year

Immigration kept Portugal's population practically unchanged in numbers.

The arrival of Brazilian migrants into Portugal has reached new levels for the fourth consecutive year even despite the coronavirus pandemic restrictions.

Portugal's Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) is expected to make these figures official on June 23 with the release of its annual statistical report to which the Portugal Giro said to have had access.

The Brazilian community would thus be the largest among foreigners residing in the country. According to the Immigration, Borders and Asylum Report (RIFA), there was an increase in arrivals during 2020 of about 22% compared to 2019. The Brazilian community officially residing in Portugal was 151,304 two years ago and rose to 183,993 by December last year.

According to these reports, 42,245 new residence permits were issued in 2020, just 6,000 less than the 48,600 in 2019. But the number of Brazilians in Portugal is even higher, as the report does not include data on immigrants with dual Portuguese or other European Union citizenship.

The year 2017 marks the beginning of the new Brazilian wave in Portugal when the community began to grow again after a six-year fall. And it kept growing.

Brazilians who already had the move to Portugal as a pre-pandemic goal to give more security and access to quality public services for their families were boosted to take action in light of the effects of the sanitary restrictions on the economy and the new arrivals feature both millionaires with gold visas and ordinary citizens willing to start over in jobs outside their training areas alike.

And the trend is for this flow to continue. Until mid-April of this year, thousands of Brazilians had applied for a residence permit within two months. There were 3,700 requests, at a rate of about 60 per day.

In addition to that, most of those who were already in Portugal when the pandemic broke out decided to stay. So much so that the renewals of residence visas for Brazilians increased by 55% in 2020: there are around 56 thousand against 36 thousand in 2019.

The arrival of immigrants into Portugal prevented 2020 from ending with a population decrease. Although the increase was residual, of 0.02%, the 67,160 foreigners who began to reside in the country, most of them Brazilians, offset the negative natural balance of 38,931 people and the emigration of 25,886 Portuguese nationals.