1. According to Rui Moreira, mayor of Porto, the invasion of an immigrant house in that city and the beating of its residents was a heinous crime. Therefore, he concluded, the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) must be abolished. Sorry? What is the relationship between the two themes? I couldn’t help but remember an oral exam, many years ago, in which the teacher, already exasperated by the incoherence of the student’s answers, angrily retorted: what you say is as logical as me saying that my grandmother is green and that , therefore, a purple cow fell into my neighbor’s yard. The exasperation became famous throughout the university and applies like a glove to Rui Moreira’s intervention.
two. The intervention has no logic, but it has intentions. Basically, it suggests that if there are hate crimes against immigrants it is because there are too many immigrants, especially too many undocumented immigrants, and difficulties in integrating them. It is true that if there are no immigrants there will hardly be crimes against immigrants. Monsieur de La Palice couldn’t say it better. Ironies aside, what is at stake in the Porto mayor’s statements is, firstly, holding the victim responsible for the aggression he was subjected to. They let in too many people, poor ones at that, and then what are they waiting for? An obvious variation on the classic, they get used to those necklines and then complain about what?
3. Secondly, the intention to take advantage of an emotional context clouded by hate speech to question the immigration policy that gave rise to AIMA. Reaffirm: there is no relationship between a crime against immigrants and immigration policy, regardless of its goodness or greater or lesser success. No relationship other than the one that, opportunistically, wanted to create in order to, shifting attention to the domain of emotions, affirm a thesis without having to argue in its defense or prove its foundations. A banal rhetorical trick, too often used in populist speeches.
4. But let’s discuss AIMA, a good idea that has had difficulty coming to fruition but deserves to be defended. The creation of the agency, whose central objective is the processing of immigrants’ documentation, was based on a simple idea that I have already stated in the pages of this newspaper: immigration is not a police matter. Separating documentation functions from police border control, mixed in the former Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF), was and is a good idea. And it has nothing to do with an alleged lack of control over immigrant arrivals. In fact, this control is carried out, at the border, mainly by the PSP, which inherited the powers of the SEF for this purpose, and in the consular services of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is responsible for issuing entry visas into national territory.
In other words, AIMA begins by having nothing to do with the alleged lack of control that is claimed to exist. AIMA took over the documentation functions that were in the SEF, inheriting from this service not only those functions but also the human resources that carried them out. It was not left with border control or the issuance of visas that allow immigration to be regularized from its origin.
5. One of the evils of public debate in Portugal is its frequent excess of parochialism. Before starting to invent any narrative about the alleged failure of national public immigration policy, it is useful to look at what is happening in the “rest” of the world. Perhaps this way we will discover that what we think is a national particularity is, after all, a global political dilemma. For example, the magazine The Economist recently published an article discussing the fact that the West is currently facing an unprecedented level of new immigrant arrivals. Not Portugal, due to the extinction of the SEF (be patient!), but all Western countries, on all continents, from the USA to Australia or the United Kingdom. It also highlights that this greater number of new arrivals mainly includes low-skilled immigrants and, due to the pressure it places on national authorities, a growing number of undocumented immigrants. Welcome to the global real world.
6. In this context, AIMA was unlucky. Not only did it inherit from the SEF an astronomical number of pending issues (more than 350 thousand), it also has to make up for the delay in processing these pending issues and issuing new residence permits at a time when, like all similar agencies in other countries, it faces a very greater migratory pressure. Had the SEF not been extinguished, the situation would have been the same. Or do we really think that the SEF had a level of competence and capacity to act that far exceeded that of the entities responsible for immigration control in the USA, Australia or the United Kingdom?
7. Wanting to take advantage of a crime to change immigration policy without saying what you are doing is dishonest. And, taking into account the boring reality described above, I only see one reason for this. Step back and reinforce the treatment of immigration as a police matter. Which wouldn’t surprise me if an intervention by Chega was at stake. But I confess that it surprised me that it was by Rui Moreira.
