At the start of the biweekly debate, Luís Montenegro was questioned by PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares about the bill approved last Thursday in the Council of Ministers, which will be open for public consultation starting today before being submitted to parliament.
“What we have today is permissive legislation whose rules end up favoring abuse and ultimately benefit those who do not comply,” stated the Prime Minister.
Montenegro stated that the regime now proposed by the Government aims to provide “greater agility, greater ability to be consequential” with immigrants in an illegal situation.
“To have a policy that can, on one hand, recover compliance with the rules and demonstrate that it is worth coming to Portugal legally, and also show that it is not worth coming to Portugal outside legal principles and that those who come outside these principles will have to return to their origin,” he said.
The head of Government pointed out that the immigration policy changes by the PSD/CDS-PP executive began with the end of the manifestation of interest “which had a calling effect” and continued with changes to the legal regime for foreigners and to the nationality law (still under review by the Constitutional Court).
“Now with greater effectiveness in return, we will indeed be able to have regulated and humanistic immigration, dignifying the people and families who come to Portugal to enrich our human resources and build their life projects,” he said.
On this matter, Hugo Soares accused the PS of denying responsibility “in what happened in the country regarding unregulated immigration.”
“There is always this resistance whenever immigration is discussed, perhaps because Deputy José Luís Carneiro was the one who initiated the extinction of the Foreigners and Borders Service,” he accused.
