High Commissioner for Migration explains how Portugal is welcoming Ukrainians
In Portugal, the effort is autonomous due to the effort organized mainly by civil society.
Ukrainians themselves have contacted the Portuguese government to get support to join friends and family, as well as municipalities have to go and look for private people with support from organizations and citizens.
There have already been registered 14,000 requests for protection from registered close people who are already in their territory with the registered services.
In addition, several government entities create a working group to respond to the emergency situation, in addition to granting the protection request, immediate access to the tax identification number and Social Security identification number.
Training, Portuguese language courses and access to the labor market are other support initiatives, such as school insertion.
Sónia Pereira also mentions the precautions to be taken to avoid situations of human trafficking and refugee children. For now, the cases that have reached the High Commission in Portugal have been residual, “a dozen”, which are although already being investigated.
More than three million people have already fled to neighboring countries and the number of refugees is expected to rise in the coming days as the war rages in Ukraine.
Internal relocation is also significant.