Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo

Cultural mediators at the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA) walked out on 30 March 2026 with adhesion above 70% in Porto, directly hitting the pipeline for Portugal's D8 digital nomad visa (income floor €3,680/month, four times the national minimum wage). A pending residency caseload of between 40,000 and 60,000 cases remains from the 400,000 inherited from the old Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF) in October 2023.

AIMA was created in October 2023 to replace SEF, separating enforcement from integration and asylum services. Cultural mediators constitute nearly half of AIMA's effective front-line staffing, serving as interpreters and navigators for non-Portuguese-speaking applicants. The strike lands in the same week that the Portuguese Parliament voted 152 to 64 to double the residency-to-citizenship requirement from five to ten years. Immigration lawyers called the government's pledge to clear the AIMA backlog by end-2026 "offensive and shameless".

AIMA is the operational bottleneck for both digital nomads and family reunification cases. The D8 visa pipeline runs through AIMA's Porto and Lisbon offices, and the strike leaves applicants who have already met the income threshold waiting for appointments that cannot be scheduled. The left demands AIMA process faster; the far right demands it process fewer. Neither Coalition can achieve its objective without the agency functioning at full capacity.