Piedade, a Portuguese woman who has lived here for over 60 years, dislikes what has happened to it. Nestled beneath Lisbon’s former Moorish quarter, the Rua do Benformoso is a winding street of decaying buildings faced with azulejos (decorative tiles). It is lined with Indian food shops and stores selling hookah pipes and mobile phones.
“There’s drugs and crime,” she says. “I stay inside at home.”
It also introduced fast-track visas for key workers. It required immigrants to get appropriate visas, re-established a border force, stretched the time to obtain citizenship to between seven and ten years, and restricted family reunions. Across the border in Spain, in contrast, the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has defied the European Union’s consensus on tighter controls. Mr Sánchez has stressed not only Spain’s humanitarian values but the benefits of immigration to economic growth. It helped that around half of the immigrants are Spanish-speakers from Latin America. In Spain, with polls showing the right likely to win the election, policy seems certain to change. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s Party, wants a points system and quotas for immigration and priority for Latin Americans. That sounds like the Portuguese approach. Iberia may soon no longer be an exception to the European norm.
The centre-right government of Luis Montenegro, which came to office in 2024, set out to do this. Net migration has fallen from 270,000 a year to 60,000. Spain too has seen a spike in immigration, with 3.1m coming since 2021. In 2026 the foreign-born population hit 10.3m, over 20% of the total. The government expected 500,000 to apply; 1.2m did. Portugal, too, plans to regularise up to 800,000. But unlike in Spain, applicants are interviewed individually and 45,000 have been rejected, says Mr Amaro.
“We were not in control,” says António Vitorino, a Portuguese former European commissioner. It became crucial, he says, to “rebuild the credibility of the migration-regulation system”. “We’re not a closed-door, ‘remigration’ government,” says António Leitão Amaro, the minister responsible for the reforms.
Earlier this year Mr Sánchez irritated other EU governments by announcing an amnesty for those without papers.
