New Portuguese Citizenship Law Is a Start—Remigration Must Follow

In the past decade, Portugal has experienced one of the hardest demographic shocks in European—indeed, human—history. It might sound hyperbolic to put things this way. It isn’t. Between 2017 and late 2024, the foreign-born population residing in the country rose by no less than 300%, a figure unheard of anywhere else on the European continent. It would be frightful enough if official estimates of Portugal’s foreign population surpassing 15% of the total were true. Instead, the figure, which disregards all those of foreign stock either born in Portugal or naturalised as Portuguese, is a soothing panacea design to prevent a wave of wholly justified collective panic. In truth, some 30% of the country’s residents are now of foreign origins. If you ever wondered what a dying nation looks like, look at Portugal.

The dire national crisis produced by mass immigration has had profound political consequences for Portugal. It has been a crucial driving force beyond the country’s sharp turn to the right in recent elections, with two thirds of the Portuguese Parliament, the Assembleia da República, now controlled by right-of-centre parties. With the local centre-left still unmovingly attached to immigrationist orthodoxy, unlike socialist parties in countries like Denmark, that rightward turn was a sine qua non condition for any attempt at immigration reformism. An immediate priority was a revision of Portuguese nationality law, one of the continent’s most permissive. On May 3rd, not without some frustration, Portugal’s Socialist President António José Seguro signed the bill into law.

Under the latest iteration of the previous 1981 law, access to Portuguese nationality had been thoroughly facilitated. The trend toward laxism radicalised in 2018 as part of a reform implemented by then-Prime Minister—and, now, President of the European Council—António Costa. Costa is directly and personally responsible for placing, and then activating, the demographic time bomb that is now turning his country to shreds. His efforts have not only led to the explosion in immigration that has since engulfed Portugal, with Costa going to the point of signing immigration-facilitating deals with countries such as India to disastrous results; they have made it much easier for those who have come to settle in the country to obtain Portuguese nationality and, with it, the full rights of citizenship. 

Under the now—thankfully—superseded legislation, an immigrant would be able to obtain Portuguese citizenship after just five years of residence. Jus soli was vastly expanded, thus allowing virtually anyone born in Portuguese soil to become a national; Costa even went to the point of making all those not accused of serious crimes (i.e., with prison sentences longer than three years) eligible for citizenship.

This “literal madness,” as the great British politician and immigration critic Enoch Powell put it in his famous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, has extended to hundreds of thousands of recently arrived immigrants the benefits of Portuguese citizenship. Costa’s legacy is a country in which a vast percentage of the population now lacks even the remotest link to the nation—often without even a rudimentary command of its language, let alone any religious or historical connection to the land. Portugal has been denationalised, deconstructed as a national community, and converted into a confusing, shifting ethnic puzzle. This is no longer a recipe for disaster—it is an existing one. 

The new Nationality Law is a major step forward. Instead of a ludicrous five-year residence requirement for obtaining citizenship, that has now been increased to ten. These will now be counted only from the moment when an immigrant actually obtains a permit rather than the occasion of his arrival, thus adding one or two extra years to the count de facto. Jus soli was restricted to those born to parents who have legally resided in Portugal for a minimum of five years. Additionally, Portuguese citizenship can now be lost by those who practise particularly severe criminal offences. The left, of course, has deemed this legislation as “cruel.” 

While this is far from an ideal nationality law—like in countries such as Liechtenstein or the Gulf Monarchies, citizenship ought to be virtually impossible to acquire in most cases, even by those who have long lived in the country—it is, nevertheless, a most welcome improvement. It is also proof of what different and often competing branches of the “right” can accomplish when working together. This revision of the law happened only because the centre-right parties supporting the government, the Social Democrats (PSD) and the Christian Democrats (CDS-PP) joined hands with the liberals (IL) and, above all, with the main opposition party, the national-conservative Chega, to enact that most urgent of reforms.

However, the enormous harm already done by a decade of migratory madness cannot be undone by merely revising Portugal’s nationality law. Slowing future damage is important, but grossly insufficient. Though it remains in the political fringe for the moment, sooner rather than later the idea of repatriation (or remigration, as it is now more frequently put) will become mainstream—at least, among the right. Chega has been quite at the forefront of this, with a good number of its MPs—particularly its younger ones—understanding that Portugal’s predicament is now such that net zero migration, while a far-off goal, would be too little, too late. Portugal’s very survival as a cohesive, coherent state requires sizeably negative migration over an extended period. In itself, this will require focused state action. Sweden’s pay-to-go schemes are a good inspiration, but it is likely a more holistic approach, made of positive as well as negative incentives (a carrot-and-stick approach), will be necessary.

There is still some room for optimism, however. The new nationality law is an example of how things can move forward when the Right tries to govern without waiting for the Left’s edicts of approval. And, while difficult further measures will be necessary, let us not forget what Enoch had to say there: “Too often today people are ready to tell us: ‘This is not possible, that is not possible.’ I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible.”