United Colors of Portugal
The finding will not surprise anyone, in particular those who live in large urban areas: there are foreigners waiting at tables, in law, opening local businesses, teaching classes, conducting TVDE, in civil construction, at pharmacy counters, treating patients in hospital emergency departments and at supermarket checkouts. The profound demographic change that has occurred in Portugal in recent years happens, curiously, in the opposite direction to the rise of a radicalized political thought that ostracizes everything that comes from outside. And for this reason, the reality of welcoming among us translates a social behavior that shows resistance to stale nationalisms. Foreigners now have a presence in virtually all resistant areas of the economy.
The most recent portrait of the country served by the Census is a shock: one fifth of the population lives in just 1% of the territory. We are fewer, we have fewer children, we are older, we are concentrated on a small strip of the coast, we are more alone and single-parent families have increased considerably. The divorced already supplant the widowed. However, in the midst of this dark picture, there is a positive fact: we are not much less thanks to the growth of the foreign population, which already exceeds half a million people (which is roughly equivalent to twice the inhabitants we lost in a decade). Fortunately, only a small part of us still believes that foreigners came here to steal our jobs and income. Portugal is today a multicultural and multiethnic country. And this footprint is almost transverse to the territory.
Incidentally, the numbers are not more expressive – and looking specifically at the decrease in African immigrants – because in the meantime some have acquired Portuguese citizenship, fulfilling, in this way, a full integration in the country that is now theirs. So, the next time you hear a political gunman demonizing immigration, remember that, if it weren’t for foreigners, the demographic country that is still adrift would already be a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea.
*Associate Director