Without immigrants, some sectors of society would collapse, Catarina Reis Oliveira, the director of Portugal’s Migration Observatory, argued in a study presented on Monday.
“Immigrants play a fundamental role in the efficiency of labour markets, and it is clear that without immigrants, some economic sectors and activities would collapse,” she wrote in the Observatory’s Annual Statistical Report 2022, which contains indicators on the integration of this particular group of people.
In most European countries that host immigrants, including Portugal, foreigners have “higher activity rates than nationals”, it states.
“However, foreigners continue to be, compared to nationals, more represented in the basic professional groups although improvements have been observed, with the relative importance of foreigners in these groups having decreased compared to what was observed in the previous decade,” it states.
Thus, most foreign workers are associated with accommodation, catering and similar economic activities and administrative and support services economic activities.
In 2020, “imbalances in average basic salaries” also persisted. Overall, foreign workers had lower average salaries than Portuguese workers (-6.7% in 2020 and -8.2% in 2019).
The report also underlines that, although the dominant feature in the Portuguese labour market is the permanent contract, this “is not the main employment relationship for most workers of foreign nationality”.
In 2020, more than two-thirds of Portuguese employees had a permanent contract (69.8%), while in the case of foreigners, only one-third had this type of contract (35.1%).
Similar to what happens in other European countries, in Portugal, foreign residents are at greater risk of poverty and live in greater material deprivation.
In the reference years of the report, there was “a worsening in the risk of poverty or social exclusion, both for foreign residents in Portugal and for nationals”.
In 2020, the risk of poverty or social exclusion of foreigners in Portugal was 18.9%, rising to 35% in 2021 (+16 percentage points compared to the previous year and +13pp compared to that seen for Portuguese nationals).
In 2021, foreigners represented 10.1% of the total number of contributors to the Portuguese social security system, “an unprecedented relative importance” and “more expressive than expected”, given that “they only represent 6.8% of the resident population”.
“The foreign population residing in Portugal continues to play an important role in counterbalancing the accounts of the Social Security system, contributing to a relative relief of the system and to its sustainability,” she argues.
(Ana Henriques | Lusa.pt)
Source: euractiv.com
