LISBON — Portugal’s immigration agency announced on Thursday that it had issued decisions on 398,000 of the roughly 410,000 residency applications it inherited when it was created three years ago, declaring an end to a backlog that had left hundreds of thousands of migrants working legally but unable to open bank accounts, rent apartments, or leave the country.
“The era of the file that sits in a drawer for four years is over,” said Rui Marques, the president of the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum, known as AIMA. He said the agency had hired 820 staff, opened 14 new service centers, and worked through cases at a rate of nearly 1,000 a day since the start of 2025.
The figures that followed were less triumphant. Of the decided cases, 241,000 resulted in a residence permit, 94,000 were refused, and 63,000 were closed because the applicant did not respond to a request for documents or attend an appointment. Lawyers and migrant associations said many of those applicants had never received the request.
“I have clients who moved apartments twice in four years, because that is what you do when you are a farm worker,” said Sofia Ribeiro, an immigration lawyer in Beja. “AIMA sent a letter to the first address and closed the file. Technically that is a decision. In practice the person is now undocumented, and it is the agency that made them so.”
Prakash Thapa, 31, who came from Nepal in 2021 to pick berries in the greenhouses around Odemira, said he learned in September that his application had been closed. He had sent his updated address, he said, by registered mail in 2024. “I have the receipt,” he said, holding it up on his phone. “They have a decision. Which one of us is right?” He has filed an appeal, which the agency says will take six to nine months.
Portugal’s foreign-born population has more than doubled since 2017, to about 1.6 million, driven by agriculture, construction, and tourism, sectors that rely on workers from South Asia, Brazil, and Portuguese-speaking Africa. Successive governments have tightened the rules for arriving while promising to speed up processing for those already in the country. Mr. Marques said the closed cases were “the cost of order” and that anyone with evidence of a lost notice could reopen a file. “We are not hiding from the hard cases,” he said. “We are finally in a position to see them.”
Ms. Ribeiro said she would believe the backlog was gone when the appointment system worked. On Friday morning, the agency’s booking portal showed the next available slot in Lisbon as Feb. 3.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the European edition with the headline: Portugal Says It Has Cleared a Backlog of 400,000 Immigration Cases. Migrants Say Not So Fast..
