חוקי הגירה חדשים "זמניים"

After having participated in the seventh edition of the Euro-Africa Forum, at the Carcavelos Campus of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was questioned about the meeting he had 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.

"I had the opportunity to say, at the time, that my position on the law that I promulgated was the position of understanding that there was a serious situation of bottlenecks in the regularisation of migrants, and therefore a temporary regime was justified", said the head of state.

"Temporary regime means temporary regime", Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa then stressed.

At the beginning of June, the President of the Republic promulgated the decree-law approved by the Council of Ministers that changed the legal regime for the entry and stay of foreigners in national territory, revoking residence permits based on expressions of interest presented by immigrants.

At the time, he argued that it was necessary to stop the "snowball" of immigration processes, to respond to the thousands that had accumulated, thus justifying the immediate promulgation of the decree law in question.

"In relation to the immediate future, it is sensible not to let the snowball continue to grow, because if we are not chasing losses, that is, we are trying to regularize hundreds of thousands of people and at the same time enter, even before of the rest of the regime being in force, more", he argued.

For Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, it was "a matter of common sense", at that time, to try not to put pressure "in terms of more people in this machine".

"We need to quickly regularise thousands, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, who have been waiting for this for years. This is urgent, and there are other measures that will supposedly make the machine work to make this possible. Let's see".