PORTUGAL: Special Treatment Upsets Non-Brazilian Immigrants

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Oct 24 2003 (IPS) - An agreement that went into effect this month in Portugal, which benefits undocumented immigrants from Brazil, has upset foreign nationals from other Portuguese-speaking countries.

The measure favours some 30,000 Brazilians working in Portugal without the required residency permit, who will thus join another 59,000 whose papers were already in order.

The agreement was reached by Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durao Barroso and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the latter’s first official visit to Lisbon in July.

The amnesty covers Brazilians who had entered Portugal by the date the accord was signed, Jul. 11, and who had a job.

The special treatment granted Brazilian immigrants has not pleased foreign nationals from the former Portuguese colonies of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, East Timor, Macao in China, and Goa, Diu and Daman in India.

An estimated 600,000 legal and undocumented immigrants live in Portugal, a country of 10 million – one of the highest numbers of foreign-born nationals in Europe in proportion to the population.

Besides the nearly 90,000 legal Brazilian immigrants and another 10,000 who will remain undocumented because they arrived in Portugal after Jul. 11, the largest groups of foreigners are from the Ukraine, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Moldavia, Angola, Russia, Sao Tome and Principe, and Romania.

The heads of the ”Casa do Brasil”, an organisation that works with Brazilian immigrants in Lisbon, argue that the agreement will also have a positive impact on people from other Portuguese-language countries in the future.

The accord sets a precedent by opening up a door to the rest of the immigrant community as well, especially people from Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa, Brazilian writer and journalist Duda Guennes, the president of the general assembly of the ”Casa do Brasil”, and engineer Carlos Vianna, the organisation’s executive president, told IPS.

The arguments that enabled the agreement to be reached, ”like historic ties and a common culture and language, are even stronger in the case of the African nations, which have been independent from Portugal for much less time than Brazil,” said Guennes.

The writer acknowledged that ”we Brazilians, with respect to the rest, are privileged, but that is because we play hardball towards the undocumented Portuguese immigrants living in our country, and whose situation was also regularised through the accord.”

He added that ”Brazil declared independence in 1822, which was recognised by Lisbon in 1826, while Portuguese administration did not come to an end until 1961 in the overseas provinces in India, and 1975 in Africa and East Timor, which means that their relationship with Portugal is much more fresh.”

Guennes ruled out the possibility of difficulties arising in the European Union due to the special treatment enjoyed by Brazilians in terms of access to work visas in Portugal.

”Madrid has preferential agreements with the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, Paris has them with French-language countries in Africa, and London with the countries that formed part of the British empire. Lisbon can do the same with us, the Portuguese-speaking countries,” he said.

In Vianna’s view, the accord represents ”a major step forward in deepening relations between the two sister nations.” He said another positive aspect of the document was that it underlines the need to prevent and crack down on the trafficking of migrants.

According to statistics provided by ”Casa do Brasil”, more than 2.5 million Brazilians are currently spread around the world. But Vianna pointed out that widespread emigration ”is a relatively recent reality in Brazilian society.”

He said immigrants ”are part of the solution to Brazil’s problems,” noting that ”they send home, to Brazil, between three and four billion dollars in remittances a year.”

The phenomenon also leads to the dissemination and promotion of Brazilian products and culture abroad, creates ties at all levels, and generates short, medium, and long-term benefits, he added. ”That is what we are doing in Portugal,” he said.

But the views of the two heads of ”Casa do Brasil” were not shared by José Falcao, one of the directors of the Portuguese branch of SOS-Racism.

”The general sensation shared by immigrants is one of injustice,” the activist said in an interview with IPS. ”Everyone, and not only Brazilians, should have equal rights. It is obvious that in a state of law, you can’t have first, second and fifth-class workers.”

Falcao said the Portuguese government speaks of ”legal” and ”illegal” immigrants, which is not correct because ”there are no ‘illegals’, just ‘undocumented’ immigrants,” who according to the Portuguese constitution ”are equal in the eyes of the law, whether they are Brazilian, African, Asian, or whatever country in the world they come from.”

Brazil’s solidarity in receiving thousands of Portuguese immigrants over the space of 180 years and the fact that Portugal is today one of the five leading foreign investors in that Latin American country of 171 million ”cannot be ignored,” said José Carlos de Vasconcelos, editor-in-chief of the Lisbon weekly ”Visao”.

Angolan-Portuguese activist Timoteo Macedo, president of the Association of Immigrant Solidarity (ASI), which has 4,000 members from 75 countries, told IPS that the agreement between Brazil and Portugal was ”discriminatory and racist in nature, because when they talk about ‘linguistic identity’, they don’t want integration, but assimilation.”

Macedo said equal rights ”have nothing to do with which country one is a citizen of,” and must apply to all. He said ASI was launching a campaign under the theme ”We Are All Brazilians”.