INE has redone its 2021-2025 emigration numbers from administrative records and the total nearly quintupled. The big change is who gets counted: foreigners who drop off the registers are now in, and in 2024 and 2025 they were most of the people leaving.

By Juliana Castilho

Image: Daniel from Glasgow / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A running tracker of AIMA — case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. Updated whenever there is news.

If you are dealing with residence or nationality, this is the page to bookmark. Instead of one article per announcement, we gather the essentials of AIMA here: case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. For the citizenship rules, see the new nationality law. Official information is at AIMA. AIMA has clarified that people who applied for residence on the basis of attending a vocational course, and finished the course…

Since 3 November, Express Entry scores job offers and Canadian work experience by the occupation's median wage: 100, 70 or 50 points for an offer, up to 150 for experience. The LMIA requirement is gone. Nurses, pharmacists and software developers sit in the top band. Draws pause for up to two weeks while profiles are recalculated.

Canada changed the way it scores would-be permanent residents on Tuesday. From 3 November, Express Entry, the system behind most economic immigration to Canada, rates job offers and work experience by how well the occupation pays. It also drops a requirement that held a lot of people back. A job offer no longer needs an LMIA, the labour market impact assessment employers used to have to obtain for the offer to count. The test is not the salary you are…

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood confirmed 'earned settlement' on 2 November: 10 years by default, 5 for earners above £50,271 and for doctors, nurses and teachers, 3 above £125,141. The government's own response lists the EU Settlement Scheme among routes the reform does not touch.

The wait for permanent residence in the UK is doubling. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood took the final version of earned settlement to the Commons on Monday, and the Home Office announcement sets the new default at 10 years before anyone can apply for indefinite leave to remain. Until now it was five. If you are one of the Portuguese who moved to Britain before Brexit, the headline is simple. You are not in scope.

The official EU site still says ETIAS is not operating and collects no applications, and that the start date will be announced several months ahead. Meanwhile sites charging for the authorisation keep multiplying. What to know before you pay anyone anything.

If someone has charged you for an ETIAS, the online travel authorisation the EU plans to require of visa-free visitors, it wasn't the EU. As of 1 November 2026 the official ETIAS website still states plainly that the system is not in operation and that no applications are being collected. The same page makes a promise that says a lot about the timing: the EU will announce the start date "several months" before launch. With two months of 2026 left and no…

From 30 November, Student visa applicants for a London course must show £1,570 a month for nine months, £369 more than today. Outside London it is £1,203 a month. The same rule change also prepares for the UK's return to Erasmus+ in 2027, when short exchanges can skip the Student visa.

Anyone heading to a London university next year will need a bigger pile of money sitting in the bank. From 30 November, the UK Student visa asks for proof of £1,570 a month to live in London, up from £1,529. Outside the capital the figure moves from £1,171 to £1,203. That sounds like small change until you multiply it. The UK asks for living costs for up to nine months of the course. In London that comes to £14,130, against £13,761 now, so £369 more.…

On 29 October the Council of Ministers approved the decree-law regulating Organic Law 1/2026: the language, culture, history and civics tests, the means-of-subsistence requirement, the declaration of adherence to the rule of law and biometric data collection. It still needs the President's signature and publication.

Portugal's government approved the decree-law regulating the new Nationality Law on Thursday 29 October. It is the instruction manual for the law that came into force in May, and it arrives 74 days after the deadline the law itself set. Organic Law 1/2026 was published on 18 May and gave the government 90 days to update the Portuguese Nationality Regulation, which dates from 2006. That window closed on 16 August. We checked in August and found nothing had…

The UK Budget of 28 October restores a two-year Graduate visa for graduates of high-compliance universities with strong job outcomes, just as the standard route drops to 18 months in January 2027. It also promises up to six months for laid-off highly skilled workers to find a new sponsor and new salary thresholds from spring 2027.

Anyone planning a degree in the UK had a cut pencilled in for January: the Graduate visa, which lets new graduates stay on and work, was due to shrink from two years to 18 months. The Budget that Chancellor John Healey delivered on 28 October walks part of that back. Two years return for graduates of high-compliance universities with strong labour market outcomes. Everyone else stays on 18 months.

A group of Brazilians says it paid an alleged lawyer for AIMA appointments that never existed, and at least two have gone home. AIMA only sends bookings from @aima.gov.pt, or @sef.pt on systems still being migrated. How to check before paying, and where to report it.

A group of Brazilians says it paid an alleged lawyer around 30,000 euros in total for appointments at AIMA, Portugal's immigration agency, that never existed. On a list the group shared, 21 people account for almost 18,500 euros in fees, and at least two of them have given up and gone back to Brazil. Anyone who has dealt with AIMA will recognise the pattern. People arrive on a tourist visa, can't get a slot on their own, and end up paying a middleman who…

PSP says more than 1,000 migrants will be removed by the end of 2026, possibly an all-time high. In its border unit's first year, 1,732 returns were voluntary and 221 forced, against 23,133 orders to leave issued in 2025.

Portugal's public security police, the PSP, expects to remove "well over a thousand" migrants from the country by the end of 2026, and says this could turn out to be the year with the most removals on record. The estimate came from the force itself, in a response published on Tuesday. Since August last year it has been the body in charge of checking foreigners' status and carrying out returns. The headline number needs one piece of context. In most cases,…

Portugal's registry office had 690,480 nationality applications pending on 30 June, up 38% in a year, and 26% come from people who live here and applied on residence grounds. At 2025's pace, that queue alone is roughly 14 years long.

Portugal's registry office, the IRN, was sitting on 690,480 undecided nationality applications on 30 June. The figures come from the Ministry of Justice and show a 38% rise on the same point in 2025, when the pile stood at roughly half a million. That headline number blurs who is actually in the queue. Only 26% of the files belong to immigrants living in Portugal who applied on the strength of their years of legal residence. Most of the rest are…

AIMA's 2025 Migration and Asylum Report shows voluntary-departure notices jumping 52-fold in a single year, in the same report that shows foreign-population growth slowing to 2.7%.

In 2024, Portugal's immigration agency AIMA and the police issued 446 notices telling foreigners to leave the country voluntarily. In 2025, that number jumped to 23,133 — more than 50 times as many, according to AIMA's 2025 Migration and Asylum Report, which pulls together the year's full numbers for the first time. The jump sits in the same report we already used to show that Portugal's foreign resident population grew just 2.7% in 2025, down from 39%…

Pedro Portugal Gaspar was called before Parliament this week for a seat on Portugal's Competition Authority board. He is the second AIMA president to leave since the agency replaced SEF in 2023, and the government has not said who comes next.

Pedro Portugal Gaspar is on his way out as president of AIMA, the agency that handles immigration and residency in Portugal. He was due before Parliament's Economy and Territorial Cohesion Committee on Tuesday, 22 September — the hearing that comes before a formal appointment to the board of the Competition Authority. Gaspar took over AIMA in July 2024 from Luís Goes Pinheiro, the agency's first president, who had led it since it replaced the old…

AIMA's annual report closes 2025 with 1,585,854 foreign residents and 42,157 added over the year, against 238,864 in 2024. It is the slowest rate in the whole series the agency publishes, which starts in 2017, and the ranking shifted too: Angola has moved ahead of India.

There is a way of reading AIMA's annual report that skips the headline total and tells you far more. Put four years next to each other. In 2022, Portugal's foreign resident population grew by 39%. In 2023, by 31.4%. In 2024, by 18.3%. In 2025, by 2.7%. That is the slowest annual growth anywhere in the series the agency publishes, which begins in 2017. At the end of last year there were 1,585,854 foreign citizens legally resident in the country. Over the…

Law 62/2026 was published in the official gazette on 10 September and applied from the next day. It resets removal deadlines, creates a border return procedure and closes the vocational-course route to a residence permit.

For seven weeks the text sat in the president's in-tray and then in the Constitutional Court, and nothing on the ground changed. That is over. Law 62/2026 was published in the Diário da República on 10 September, and because the law says it takes effect the day after publication, it has applied since Friday 11 September. Parliament passed the decree on 17 July, the president signed it on 31 August, the prime minister countersigned on 1 September, and…