How is this sustainable? How can it be justified? How can Portugal remain Portugal in this situation? Because the migrants are largely “brown” and the natives “white,” any discussion of this is dismissed as “racist.” If it were happening in reverse, if hundreds of thousands of Portuguese were moving to Dhaka and it now had a majority Portuguese population, no one would hesitate to say that this constituted an invasion that would transform the native culture. But in this case, such things cannot be said.
“Portugal: Almost 300,000 of the roughly 500,000 inhabitants of Lisbon are immigrants,” ReMix News, October 13, 2022:
The number of immigrants residing in Portugal has never been so high, with almost 300,000 of the 500,000 residents of Lisbon labeled as immigrants, according to a report by the Globo Repórter news outlet….
Globo Repórter talked to people from Bangladesh, India, and some Brazilians, who have become the majority immigrants in Lisbon.
At the same time that this has created a diversity of cultures has created competition for jobs and housing. Since 2017, complaints of xenophobia in Portugal have increased by more than 430 percent, a dilemma that the city and the country itself have yet to resolve.
Informal work is also on the rise. The news outlet spoke with Bayê, who came to Lisbon from Dakar, Senegal. In the African country, he was a painter. In Portugal, he is an artisan. Bayê works continuously daily and earns up to €1,000 a month….
