Sign-ups for ARVoRe, the International Organization for Migration's assisted return programme, rose from an average of 55 a month in 2025 to 79 in 2026, up more than 40%. There have been 2,048 since it began, 86% of them Brazilian. Who qualifies, what it pays (up to €2,000 to restart) and how to apply.

By Juliana Castilho

Illustrative · Photo: Jose Cruz / Pexels

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. Golden visa holders have been told "next year" again. In the 2027 budget debate on 3 November, Presidency minister António Leitão…

Spain's Supreme Court has refused, by majority, to extend a voting suspension to the 189,678 adult children of people who gained Spanish nationality under the 'grandchildren law'. They can vote in the 29 November general election. The 163,355 naturalised under a Justice Ministry instruction stay suspended, as they have been since 10 September.

The adult children of people who became Spanish under the so-called grandchildren law will be able to vote in Spain's general election on 29 November. The administrative chamber of Spain's Supreme Court on Monday refused, by majority, to extend to them the voting suspension already imposed on their parents, Euronews reported. That is 189,678 people, according to Spain's Foreign Ministry, who vote from abroad.

Integrar para a Construção pairs about 300 hours of technical training with a 300-hour placement at a building firm, paying up to one IAS a month plus meal and transport allowances. AIMA republished the rulebook on 3 November with three-working-day deadlines and a Portuguese-language requirement. The first cycle drew 44 trainees towards a 500 target.

If you hold a Portuguese residence permit and fancy learning a trade on a building site, the state will pay you up to €537.13 a month while you do it. The scheme is called Integrar para a Construção, run by AIMA (the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) with the construction industry, and its rules have just been redone: AIMA Deliberation 1230/2026, published in the Diário da República on 3 November, republishes the whole rulebook with the…

The European Commission's 2026 asylum and migration report (COM(2026) 835, 6 November) names Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Spain as under pressure. Portugal is in no category, yet ranks second in the EU for Schengen return-alert hits and third for return orders, relative to GDP and population.

Portugal is not under migratory pressure, not at risk of it and not facing a "significant migratory situation". That is the verdict of the annual asylum and migration report the European Commission published on 6 November, the first since the EU's Pact on Migration and Asylum took effect on 12 June. Then the report does something it does not have to. It names five countries that fall into no category but face "specific situations" worth flagging. Portugal…

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.

Portugal's National Statistics Institute (INE) has redone its sums, and emigration over the past five years turns out to be far bigger than anyone thought. Under the revised series, which Jornal de Negócios sets out from Público's reporting, 782,248 people left the country between 2021 and 2025. For 2021 to 2024 alone, the old estimate was about 124,000 departures. The new one is above 602,000. Nearly five times as many.

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…