Nepalese and French foreign residents are those whose number has grown the most in the last 10 years, but the largest foreign community of residents in the region is those of Brazilian origin, according to figures released by Pordata yesterday, on International Migration Day.
The report showed that the number of Nepalese individuals living in Portugal increased by a factor of 24 between 2008 and 2018, although they did not exceed 11,487 people, while French immigrants grew four times, from 4,576 to 19,771 in 10 years.
The Pordata figures point out that other communities which also almost doubled were Indians, Spaniards, Chinese and British, throughout the country. In 2018, there were 26,445 British residents, 24,856 Chinese, 14,066 Spanish and 11,340 Indians living in Portugal.
According to the data, nearly 480,000 foreigners were legally living in Portugal in 2018, and about one in four were Brazilian, totalling 104,504, followed by Cape Verdeans (34,444), Romanians (30,908) and Ukrainians (29,197).
The data also shows that about one in ten babies born in Portugal were from foreign nationals.
Of the 87,020 babies born last year, 9,389 were foreign nationals.
Pordata points out that most of the foreign population lives in the metropolitan area of Lisbon (50%) and the Algarve (16%), with the municipality of Lisbon concentrating around 16% of the total of legal immigrants.
Among the ten municipalities with the largest proportion of foreigners in their total resident population, eight are Algarvian, the data indicates.
Moreover, at least one in four residents are foreigners in the municipalities of Vila do Bispo, Albufeira, Lagos and Odemira.
According to the database, managed by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, 2.5% of the employed population in Portugal are foreign and, compared to the Portuguese, immigrants are more vulnerable to unemployment, with a rate of almost 12%, while among nationals, the unemployment rate is 7%.
Portugal is also part of only ten countries of the European Union where the percentage of foreign population in the total resident population is less than 5%.
Since 1961 Portugal has had three distinct periods where the country has experienced negative migratory balances, namely from 1961 to 1973, from 1982 to 1992 and, more recently, between 2011 and 2016. The data indicates that Portugal's population has been declining since 2010, with the country losing almost 300,000 people in the last ten years.
However, although the migratory balance has been positive over the past two years, it has not been high enough to offset negative balances in previous years as of yet.
