“They are not enemies. Just because their skin color is different or because they come from another place in the world. They come to work just like we did and are seeking a better life,” stated Mariana Mortágua during an event with immigrants and BE activists in Beja.
Mortágua emphasized that the duty of Portugal “is to create public services that allow everyone to live well and to guarantee, assume, and recognize that immigrants today contribute almost half a million pensions to our elderly.”
“Almost half a million pensions, which are the contributions from immigrants to Social Security,” she underscored, arguing that this is “the recognition” Portugal owes immigrants, rather than fostering the “politics of hate that lead to the unrest and disturbances we’ve seen at AIMA.”
Responding to journalists, Mortágua reacted to a peaceful protest by dozens of immigrants that took place today near the facilities of the Agency for Integration, Migration, and Asylum (AIMA) in Porto. Police intervened to remove a man who infiltrated the protest with anti-immigration rhetoric and clashed with demonstrators.
“It is not beneficial for anyone because we want a country that welcomes everyone, that lives well and with dignity. Portugal needs immigrants. It had a developmental model, for better or worse, that requires this immigrant labor,” she affirmed.
In the Beja district, a region focused on agriculture, Mortágua noted, “Without immigrants, there wouldn’t be people to work in agriculture.”
“Ask anyone, and they will say the same, there aren’t people to work in agriculture, nor in services. I remember during the pandemic, when it was necessary to replace those workers in homes, hospitals, in IPSS, it was the immigrants who came and worked to replace these workers when no one else wanted the job,” she recalled.
Therefore, she insisted, Portugal needs immigrants and has “an obligation” towards them: “Which is to provide documents, regularize people, and have public services for everyone, for those who were already living here and for those arriving.”
“There are many places where it’s thanks to immigrants that schools have children again. And the Alentejo is proof of that. So let’s see the positive side of this. We have people who want to make their lives in Portugal, families who want to move to Portugal, who want to work in Portugal,” she stressed, asserting that AIMA “still has much to do.”
