Portugal took more immigrants per head than Germany, now the desperate reckoning

For years, under the government of former Prime Minister— and now President of the European Council — António Costa, Portugal paraded itself as Europe’s island of multicultural tolerance. While France struggled with unrest in its suburbs, Sweden with gang warfare and Italy with ceaseless arrivals by sea, Lisbon cultivated an image of gentle openness, a liberal utopia immune to the turmoil engulfing the continent. Between 2015 and 2024, an estimated one hundred and fifty thousand immigrants arrived annually — the highest intake in Europe relative to population. For a country of just over ten million, that was a demographic revolution with no historical parallel: Not in the population movements caused by the Arab conquest and the Christian Reconquista in the Middle Ages, and not in the Age of Discoveries, when vast numbers of people stemming from Portugal’s newly conquered imperial territories settled in the country. Buoyed by Brussels’ applause and a self-congratulatory press, António Costa called it a success story. It was nothing of the sort.

The arithmetic alone should have set off the alarm. Portugal’s net immigration rate in those years overtook Germany’s at the height of the 2015 crisis. By 2023, about one in eight residents were foreign nationals—an astonishing number for a country which has traditionally exported its own people at a rate unseen elsewhere in Western Europe. This is, of course, without considering illegal and naturalised migrants—once those are taken into consideration, it would be hard to believe that the actual number of migrants could possibly be under 30 per cent of the overall national population. Lisbon’s infrastructure, of course, could not keep pace: Rents in the capital rose almost 80 per cent in five years; public schools reported overcrowding, with some 100,000 students without teachers in at least one subject; and health-care waiting lists, fragile after the pandemic, stretched into absurdity. One million Portuguese awaited a medical appointment in the second quarter of 2025.

The majority of those who came are not, contrary to what has been claimed by apologists of mass migration, economically valuable. Most filled low-wage jobs in construction, delivery and seasonal agriculture —relevant, perhaps, in the short term, but useless and unsustainable as soon as automation kicks in. Few arrived with the skills Portugal’s ageing, service-driven economy actually lacked. Instead, the government watched as dependency on welfare and informal work climbed, even as social tensions —long muffled by the naturally welcoming, patient character of the Portuguese people— began to surface.

It was in this context that the new, EPP-aligned centre-right government, hard-pressed by the rising national-conservatives of Chega and by popular anger, began to tighten the entry. The recently passed nationality law ends the automatic right to citizenship after five years of residence, increasing it to ten, and demands demonstrable integration and language proficiency. Additionally, beyond that law, the country is reassessing its policy on visas and family-reunification pathways; illegal entries more strictly penalised. At last, following a decade of migratory insanity, PM Luís Montenegro has now agreed that illegal migrants should be returned to their own country. None of it would ever have happened if Chega hadn’t grown so spectacularly and risen, as happened in the last parliamentary election, back in May, to the position of leaders of the opposition.

Predictably, the cosmopolitan commentariat erupted in ire: Portugal, they cried, was betraying its “vocation” as a nation of “migrants”. Yet what vocation, exactly, is that – to import social collapse in the name of moral virtue? The real betrayal was that of the native Portuguese citizen, who found himself paying for a dystopia he never voted for. When the European Union applauded Lisbon, it was actually applauding a government that had quietly imported the same problems that now convulse the suburbs of Paris and Malmö. 

Still, the measures announced this autumn are unlikely to suffice. The damage wrought by the Costa years is not merely conjunctural; it is structural. Labour markets have been distorted, housing rendered unaffordable, and public order strained. Portugal today faces a crisis of national identity and cohesion unseen in its past: Entire regions, both in Greater Lisbon and in the rural provinces of the Alentejo, are now faced with foreign-born majorities. This reality has shattered collective life and made the local-born population a scared, isolated minority in the land of its elders. What Portugal now needs, therefore, is not a timid recalibration of its suicidal immigration policy. It is a recovery programme that recognises what is going on as a national emergency — one that understands that government-sponsored repatriation, conducted humanely and voluntarily, is now the only way of preventing the permanent dismantling of the Portuguese nation in everything that matters: Being a community built on a shared belief system, a shared history, and a shared vision of the future. This is what Émile Durkheim once described as “anomie”, and no idea would better describe Portugal today.

Sweden, once a model of multicultural optimism for progressives the world over, now pays cash incentives for foreign-born residents to return home. Denmark similarly has a scheme subsidising relocation and reintegration abroad. From 2026, Stockholm will be offering 350,000 Swedish Kronor, or about €30,000, for immigrants who accept to abandon the country and go home. Denmark, similarly, offers both aid to those who wish to return and support in setting up a successful life in their homelands, namely through loans for establishing their own businesses. Sweden is governed by a centre-right government; Denmark, by a centre-left cabinet. These are centrist, common sense ideas that should be refined, adapted to the Portuguese context, and implemented without delay. 

Portugal’s predicament is dire; public policy must accept reality as it is and put an end to this cycle of insanity. A society of ten million cannot absorb the equivalent of a— by Portuguese standards—large city every year without its civic fabric being transformed beyond recognition. The rhetoric of wishy-washy leftism must finally give way to reason. The country has now taken the first step by reforming its nationality law, and that is good; it must now take the second by encouraging a substantial share of those who came to return with dignity to their countries of origin. 

No country, least of all one as historically cohesive as Portugal, can flourish without a shared sense of belonging. The era of moral exhibitionism is over. Portugal must finally learn the virtue of saying no—and rediscover the practical courage of putting its own people first.