Portugal's prime minister has announced that the government wants to meet with parliamentary groups next week, to draw up an action plan to resolve problems with the legalisation of immigrants.
"It will be necessary to have an action plan that we will have the opportunity to present to parliament. I have already asked the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and the Cabinet office minister to start a dialogue with the parliamentary groups on this matter next week," said Luís Montenegro in the fortnightly debate in parliament on Wednesday.
The aim, he explained, is to gather input in order to draw up "an action plan, to be carried out immediately, that can resolve the hundreds of thousands of backlogged cases and that can, in the future, prevent them from accumulating again".
"Our aim is to continue to be a country that welcomes and integrates immigrants but, in order to give dignity, we must have greater regulation and stop allowing the abuse of what are currently provisions contained in our legislation," he said.
In the final part of the debate, in response to PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares, the prime minister said that the problems that exist today at the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) are "delicate and profound".
"No one likes to see the undignified conditions in which many human beings who come to the country to work are subjected," he lamented, adding that the long queues and delays that have taken place at AIMA generate unease and feelings of insecurity.
For Montenegro, the problems at AIMA are "the result of several accumulated errors in border control and reception policies".
Earlier, the parliamentary leader of the CDS-PP, Paulo Núncio, questioned the prime minister about the impact of doubling the IRS consignment for social sector institutions, pointing out that this measure could "double the funding and budget of many institutions".
In response, Montenegro replied that the measure could benefit more than 7,000 institutions, depending on the options of taxpayers, who can choose to whom to allocate a part (from 0.5 to 1%) of their personal income tax.
"The government is governing, it has done more in 30 days than the former PS government did in eight long years," praised Paulo Núncio.
The prime minister took the opportunity to recall the recent changes approved by the government for the beneficiaries of the Solidarity Supplement for the Elderly - increasing the reference value to €600, eliminating children's income as an exclusion factor and making some medicines free for these beneficiaries - and to criticise the PS.
"They governed for eight years when they didn't decide this, they have to recognise that the decisive political will, that it was this government that shot at goal and scored," he said.
Source https://www.lusa.pt/
