PSD president Luís Montenegro on Thursday said the country should receive immigrants “in a regulated manner” and “scour the world” for communities that could better relate to the Portuguese.
“We have to bring in manpower, we have to do it in a regulated way. That is, from the perspective of our needs, the country has to be attractive from the point of view of the conditions it offers for the guarantee of basic things like housing, access to health care, access to education”, Montenegro told journalists in Mêda, Guarda, where he traveled as part of the “Sentir Portugal” initiative.
Asked about the position of Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas, who defended that immigrants should “come to countries with dignity and come to countries with work contracts”, the PSD leader expressed his “vision” on the subject.
“Obviously regulated immigration assumes that people don’t come here to spend time, people come here to work. How is this done? We have already gone through a period where it was in principle mandatory to have an employment contract to enter the country,” he justified.
In your opinion, in this matter, the Portuguese must be “a little more daring and a little more daring, directing people who come to us for immediate professional activities and ultimately for training actions that can meet the labor needs of our labor market”.
“I don’t agree 100% with this opinion [de Carlos Moedas]. I am very clear about that. I agree that there should be regulation, but we need to be bolder. We have to take risks, look around the world for communities that can relate to us better, that can better integrate into our culture, into our identity, and that can enter, through the labor market and also through training to enter the labor market. work later,” he said.
However, he stressed that he is not defending “a completely wide open door, with no rules”.
Luís Montenegro reaffirmed that the PSD has already defended in parliament that Portugal needs a migration agency dedicated to designing, programming, attracting, welcoming and integrating immigrants.
“I have one certainty: both me and engineer Carlos Moedas have the same goal, which is a regulated immigration policy that can serve our labor market. We agree on that,” he said.
Already “the way this is achieved may have some distractions, but of course these are options for political power to take”.
“In the goal, in what is most important, we are in agreement, since it would be normal for us to be part of the same party and because we have this political affinity with which I speak to you,” he noted.
Montenegro reaffirmed its party’s will “a program full of welcome, integration of migrant workers, appreciation for people”.
He also said it is necessary to tell the Portuguese that immigrants are coming to bridge existing gaps in many areas of economic activity.
“If we do nothing, in 40 or 50 years we will be less than two million or 2.5 million people and a Portuguese society of 7.5 or eight million people is not viable from an economic point of view and it is not viable from a social point of view, because we will not have the contributions for the state to guarantee the performance of its main tasks and also the guarantee of its basic services,” he warned.
Source: DN
