The Council of Ministers today approved a new plan with the snappy title of ‘Vem,’ an acronym for Valorização do Empreendedorismo Emigrante (Enhancement of Immigrant Entrepreneurship.)
This remarkably late-in-the-day, pre-election initiative aims to help immigrants and those of Portuguese descent who want to come to, or return to, Portugal.
The Vem programme 'aims to promote the return to Portugal of immigrants and those of Portuguese descent with a package of measures that encourages this flow and helps those interested in setting up their own business in the country.’
This is the exact opposite of the government's previous stance of exhorting people to leave the country to experience the world as each worker that leaves is one less on the unemployment list.
This strategic plan also aims to provide support for companies that hire unemployed Portuguese who live abroad; to give immigrants six months internship if they have been unemployed for a long time and are over 30; to support the hiring of highly qualified Portuguese who live abroad and a programme to support business start ups in Portugal.
This limp response to a huge problem was just what opposition leader António Costa needed to finish off the week, saying this is not a real programme at all as the government aims to support only 40 or 50 projects when 300,000 people have left the country.
Costa questioned whether the government was even aware of the flood of workers that had left the country and whether its latest initiative would have any effect at all.
The Socialist leader said that the country has lost about 300,000 people who have emigrated, more than 110,000 are young people, many of them highly qualified and that this loss of human capital has not been seen in Portugal since the 1960s.
The government’s aim to help 40 to 50 projects, maybe 100 or 200 later on, will have no discernible effect on the 300,000 people who have left for economic stability overseas, reckons Costa whose main concern is finding jobs for those who have stayed behind to face the music of austerity, high taxes, corruption and a legal system that now officially is recognised as the slowest in Europe.
Luring capital from abroad is one of the government's stated aims but it has failed to provide an environment to attract immigrant business owners who look at employment social security costs of 34%, an impenetrable and inefficient legal system, corruption from ministerial level down to local councils and a tangle of ever-increasing red tape that even nationals have difficulty in fathoming out.
A snappy tile and some kindly press coverage will serve only to add more complexity to an economic system that remains unfriendly and dangerous for immigrant entrepreneurs to risk their money in.
