If in 2020, foreigners represented 6.4 percent of the total
number of residents, in 2021 they became 6.8% (698,887 people), according to
the 2022 Annual Statistical Report of the Migration Observatory.
“At the end of the decade, the country reaches unprecedented
values of close to seven hundred thousand foreign residents, a number never
before reached in Portugal”, reads the document.
The reasons for foreigners entering the country remain
essentially associated with the study, family reunification, and retirement: in 2019
these three types of visas together represented 85.1 percent of the total
number of residence visas issued at consular posts (46.6 percent for study, 14
percent for retirees and 24.5 percent for family reunification).
The trend was repeated in 2020, “when they represented 88
percent of all visas (53.6 percent for study, 12.8 percent for retired people
and 21.6 percent for family reunification).
In 2021, they accounted for 82.4 percent of all residence
visas issued (46.5 percent for study, 21.5 percent for retirees, and 14.4
percent for family reunification).
Positive impact
However, as the director of the Observatory, Catarina Reis
Oliveira, author of the study, underlines, with Portugal in a situation of
marked demographic aging, “not all immigration profiles will be able to
alleviate the country’s demographic situation”, since retired foreigners “tend
to reinforce the relative importance of elderly residents” and, unlike the
immigrant population of working age and childbearing age, which the country has
traditionally received in recent decades, “do not mitigate the demographic
aging of the country”.
There are municipalities in Portugal where more than a third
of the resident population is foreign, reaching 41.2 percent in Vila do Bispo,
37.1 percent in Albufeira, and 35 percent in Lagos.
“The structure of the ten numerically most representative
foreign nationalities in Portugal underwent some changes in the reference years
of this report, namely associated with the increase in the number of nationals
from some European countries (Italy, France and the United Kingdom) and Asia
(India), and the decrease of some nationalities from the PALOP [Portuguese-speaking
African countries] and Eastern Europe”, reads the document.