Portuguese immigration law considered excessively restrictive by legal expert

Legal expert and professor Ana Rita Gil criticized Portugal's current migration legislation as excessively restrictive and pointed out systemic failures in AIMA's administration, marking the agency's three-year anniversary on Thursday 29 October 2026. She highlighted that 85,000 pending cases and a lack of basic communication channels — noting AIMA has no telephone helpline and relies on an unresponsive general email — force immigrants into costly court proceedings to compel administrative decisions. While praising the regularisation of half a million pending cases, she noted that immigrants are frequently left in irregular status due to administrative bottlenecks, barring them from university enrolment, bank accounts, and risking deportation. She also supported the 2024 abolition of the 'manifestação de interesse' mechanism, agreeing it created a pull factor for irregular migration, but criticized the restrictive turn in subsequent regulations.