The Italian community in Portugal has experienced exponential growth in recent years, with a special emphasis on the presence of Italian-Brazilians. According to recent data, around 40% of Italian citizens residing in Portugal have Brazilian roots, totaling approximately 12 thousand people.
In an interview with the newspaper Public, the ambassador Claudio Miscia highlighted that the Italian population in Portugal has grown in the last five years at an average of 10% per year. “Every year, 18% more citizens arrive and around 8% leave the country. Twenty years ago, there were only 20 Italians living in Portugal, and none of them were born in Brazil”, emphasizes Miscia.
This change in the profile of the Italian community is the result of several factors, such as the ease of obtaining Italian citizenship for Brazilians with Italian ancestry and the attraction exerted by Portugal as... destination for immigrants.
However, this exponential growth has generated challenges.
The growing demand for consular services, such as issuing passports, has been a challenge for the Italian embassy in Lisbon. The consul Simone Salvatore admits that the high demand for consular services, especially the issuance of passports, overloads the services.
“We have 30 Italian citizens residing in Portugal, but until November of last year, when I took office, only 150 passports were being issued per month, which amounts to 1.800 per year. Since the Italian passport is valid for 10 years, three thousand passports would be needed per year,” he states.
The diplomat emphasizes, however, that, given the high demand, he had to double the number of passports issued to try to reduce the waiting list. “So much so that he is issuing 300 documents per month, but there was one month when the number reached 350.”
Asked if Italian-Brazilians are contributing to the congestion in the passport application queue, Ambassador Miscia states that they are not. "We do not discriminate based on where citizens were born." They are all Italian".
The ambassador, who is the son of a Brazilian mother, has a slight Carioca accent, although he was born in Italy.
