The resolution of the Council of Ministers published creates the Mission Structure for the Recovery of Pending Processes at the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) and authorises the recruitment of the two mission teams of a maximum of 100 specialists, 150 assistant technicians and 50 operational assistants.

The diploma provides that the structure will end its functions, on June 2, 2025.

In the diploma, the Government highlights the country's challenges with immigration, such as the large backlog of regularisation processes and the inability of services to respond, a situation that it says poses a serious problem with regards to the dignity of immigrants seeking Portugal, leaving them in a situation of lack of legal protection and social vulnerability.

It was this ineffectiveness of the institutions responsible for granting documentation to foreign citizens that contributed to the fact that there are currently around 400,000 regularisation processes in the national territory pending analysis.

AIMA has been the target of complaints from precarious workers who say they have permanent roles in the organisation, complaints that received the solidarity of AIMA unions, according to statements to Lusa two weeks ago.

The president of the AIMA Workers' Union, Artur Girão, asked for the situation of cultural mediators who have been in precarious employment conditions to be analysed on a case-by-case basis, while Manuela Niza, from the recently founded Union of Migration Technicians (STM), asked for a response from the guardianship to the problem.

The resolution establishes that the new 300 workers to be hired to support AIMA will be recruited through protocols with public or private entities, through four contractual modalities; mobility, employment contract with a fixed or uncertain term, transfer of public interest, or service provision contract.