Africans who have never set foot in Africa, Brazilians whose only knowledge of Brazil comes from TV or the stories of their parents and grandparents: these are Portugal’s so-called second- and third-generation immigrants, who are not actually immigrants at all. But despite being born and raised in Portugal, they are still legally classified as foreigners.
Most are the children and grandchildren of workers who came to Portugal from Portuguese-speaking former colonies such as Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Saõ Tome and Principe and East Timor, who have been joined over the past 15 years by immigrants from eastern European countries like Ukraine and Moldavia. Portugal is the only country they have ever known, but under current Portuguese law they are foreigners in the land of their birth.
”Citizenship is not just a minor detail. Being a foreigner in the only country you know can lead to an identify conflict,” analyst Alexandra Correia noted in a study published this week in Portuguese magazine Visao.
The release of Correia’s study of second- and third-generation ”immigrants” in Portugal coincided with a government announcement of changes in the country’s citizenship law.
The current legislation is based on the principle of jus sanguinis (right of blood), whereby nationality or citizenship is determined by the nationality or citizenship of one’s parents.
The government of Socialist Prime Minister José Sócrates, who took office in March, plans to introduce the principle of jus soli (right of the soil) for third-generation immigrants, meaning that Portuguese citizenship will be granted to children born in Portugal whose parents were also born in Portugal, but whose own parents were foreigners.
This particular procedure was chosen to prevent people from coming to Portugal on tourist visas and giving birth here to claim Portuguese citizenship for their children, which would be ”an invitation to backdoor immigration”, according to Minister of the Presidency Pedro Silva Pereira.
Because of Portugal’s membership of the European Union, ”a passport is not just Portuguese, it is European, and we have a responsibility towards our fellow members”, added the minister.
The adoption of the proposed reform is considered a foregone conclusion, since the Socialist Party holds an absolute majority in the country’s unicameral Parliament.
Silva Pereira hopes the change in legislation will serve as ”a major contribution to strengthening integration”, and describes it as ”a question of social justice and peace”.
He explained that the right to citizenship will also extend to second-generation immigrants whose parents are from a Portuguese-speaking country and have legally resided in Portugal for at least six years with a residence permit.
For those from other countries, the procedures are more complicated. The minimum requirement is 10 years of legal residence, a status that can be acquired after spending five years in the country with ”permission to stay” status. This is an intermediate category that was created in the early 1990s to control the heavy influx of immigrants from eastern Europe.
The government also plans to speed up the resolution of pending cases in the agency responsible for immigration matters, the Service for Border Control and Aliens (SEF). Requests for a residence permit, for example, can currently take up to three years, owing to the ”agonisingly slow” bureaucracy involved, said Silva Pereira. The SEF is also facing a major backlog in the processing of requests for citizenship. — IPS