“At first, the no-show rate hovered around 10%, but it has increased a bit and now stands at about 15% for those who are scheduled daily but do not appear,” stated the official during the sidelines of the conference “Being an Immigrant in Portugal,” organized by the Civic Association +Porto.
Pedro Portugal Gaspar acknowledged it is a “worrying issue,” adding that “several alerts have been published on the [AIMA] website for people to update their addresses.”
“One of the reasons we consider may be old email accounts [of people] who have been waiting for years to be called by the administration,” continued the president of AIMA, lamenting the existence of “an installed load that is not optimized.”
During his speech at the conference, Pedro Portugal Gaspar stated that AIMA has “the capacity to schedule and receive 1,000 people daily, but the fact is that 150 do not show up,” a situation that worsens when it is known that “there are people who cannot get an appointment.”
“There is something here that I don’t understand. Surely, the fault also lies with AIMA, and AIMA assumes responsibility, I have no problem with that. However, there is also something that doesn’t align. Why aren’t people showing up, what are they waiting for?” he questioned.
A similar issue occurs, albeit on a smaller scale, with the collection of residence authorization cards, as the official explained that “cards are also returned” because the holders “were not at the delivery destination” and then “take time to be collected, despite AIMA making several efforts to communicate the existence of these cards.”
“There are approximately 8,000 issued cards that have not been collected, at least in rough or general terms,” he revealed.
During the question and answer segment of the conference, Pedro Portugal Gaspar heard from lawyers about difficulties in completing processes for people who have been working in Portugal for two or more years with a clean criminal record, notwithstanding the demand for labor in agriculture and construction and the risk of requests being denied by AIMA, which could result in court congestion with appeals from immigrants.
Others present alerted the AIMA official about the “duality of criteria” among employees in issuing authorizations, suggesting “training for those in customer service.”
In his final remarks, the president of AIMA noted that “Portugal is experiencing a very exceptional situation, bringing together a change in administrative structure, an increase in volume, and new legislative solution rules, and therefore all of this causes some embarrassment,” concluding that “only demagogically can it be said that this was very easy to resolve.”
