Covid-19. Many Portuguese emigrants spend Christmas in Portugal and follow rules, says MNE
Speaking to journalists at the end of the presentation of the 2020 Emigration Report, which took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Lisbon, Augusto Santos Silva indicated that the general panorama is that there is “a very significant movement of Portuguese or Portuguese descendants who are different from different countries spend Christmas in Portugal”.
“It is enough to look at the airports of Lisbon and Porto in the countries to see this type of movement from countries like France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Germany, to countries of great qualitative and quantitative expression of the Portuguese communities”, he stated .
Augusto Santos Silva stressed, those Portuguese communities, “a clear conscience and a clear knowledge of the rules”.
“The number of people who come to comply with the rule of negative testing or without a digital certificate is absolutely residual and they are also complying with the rules in Portugal: Use of masks in closed spaces, social distance, avoidance of groups and crowds” , he added.
According to the 2020 Emigration Report, presented today in Lisbon, the number of Portuguese emigrants in 2020 was the lowest in the last 20 years, a figure to which covid-19 and `Brexit` contributed.
Prepared by the Observatório da Emigração, a research center of the ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, the report indicates that, from 80 thousand reported in 2019, this number dropped to 45 thousand in 2020.
The reduction was general, encompassing practically all the traditional destinations of Portuguese emigration.