Thousands of immigrants who have been waiting for months for their resident card are now being notified by the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) that they have 10 days to pay a fee, under penalty of having the processes annulled. The values reach 400 euros and caught users by surprise, who rushed to the agency’s counters asking for explanations.
The emails started arriving on Wednesday morning. For those who have pending processes, the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum informed that, to schedule the long-awaited service, it is necessary to pay a fee within a maximum period of 10 days.
“We were all surprised,” says Rakesh Kumar, an immigrant. “Now we have to pay everything in ten days? A lot of people are confused. Is it false or is it true? We do not know.”
The fear that the process has returned to square one is mixed with the surprise of the procedure and the amount at stake.
“They tell us to give 400 euros after ten days”, reports Rakesh Kumar. “It’s not possible.”
At the Faro counter, the queue for service this morning had more than 60 users. Nobody seems to understand very well why everything changed, especially because There are those who have been waiting eight months to schedule the issuance of their resident card.
“We don’t like this procedure”, says Rakesh Kumar. “As it was before, there was no problem. We had one or two months. There may be people who are not here. They may be in another country and don’t know it. But they only give us ten days. ”
Failure to pay, warns the agency, means the order will be cancelled.
To SIC, the AIMA confirms this to be the case and justifies the measure with the 400 thousand pending cases. The new procedure It’s supposed to be a way to speed them up.
“Notifications are sent asking citizens to pay fees to update their documentation. We have to understand that, in the space of two years, people’s lives change. Changes of residence, sometimes even changes of work entities”, notes Artur Jorge Girão, from the AIMA Workers Union.
“When they are called to come to the service stations, all this work has already been done and, therefore, the service is faster, it allows us to push the availability of vacancies a little more, and, thus, try to reduce these pending issues”, he maintains. .
A change also took the Government. On Wednesday, the Ministry of the Presidency said, in statements to Antena 1, that it was not aware of the new procedures in the agency it oversees.
