Immigrants in concentration against AIMA’s lack of response
Immigrants, the majority of Asian origin, have scheduled for this Monday a concentration with the agency headquarters for integration, migrations and asylum (AIMA) in Lisbon. The goal is to contest discrimination and lack of structure responses.
The initiative has the support of the largest association of immigrants in the country, immigrant solidarity, which has collected many complaints of immigrants from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and India.
According to the president of the association, they are those « that the Portuguese state does not want to accept ». Timóteo Macedo explained that a group of immigrants asked the association to carry out a “demonstration of discontent”, with this Monday being the first of several foreseen against Portuguese migratory policy.
« Nothing falls from heaven, nothing is given to us, if we do not fight so that things change, » said the manager about the concentration scheduled for 10h00.
The leader accused Aima of showing a « great innovation, » which leaves the lives of thousands of suspended immigrants, and accused this state structure of « not responding and rejecting more than 50% of previous demonstrations of interest. »
In addition, immigrants identified as irregular in other European countries are placed in a “non -admission list of the Schengen space” and, because of this, have no response from AIMA.
These people chose to come to Portugal to ask for demonstrations of interest and would be for AIMA to identify the cases and remove them from the list in question if they comply with the legal requirements in Portugal.
But “AIMA is doing absolutely nothing, complaining of having no human resources and says it has not often skills to do it,” accused Timóteo Macedo, quoted by the Portuguese agency.
Concentration aims to “alert civil society and media to the situation of these thousands and thousands of people who have their lives suspended”.
« They are working here, they do their discounts, have passed another country and did nothing evil. But now they have their lives standing, » he said.
