Thousands protest 'uncontrolled immigration' to Portugal

Lisbon — 

Thousands of protesters waving Portuguese flags and roaring the nationalist anthem rallied successful Lisbon connected Sunday to explicit their choler astatine "illegal" and "uncontrolled" immigration.

The demonstrators marched down banners demanding the "end of wide immigration" and the expulsion of immigrants blameworthy of crimes, astatine the protestation called by the far-right Chega party, the country's third-largest governmental force.

Immigration is “very good” but “rules are needed,” said Cecilia Guimaraes, a 66-year-old teacher whose parents emigrated to Canada.

"We emigrated legally. That's however it should hap successful a developed country," she told AFP, complaining of a emergence successful insecurity she fears is linked to overseas arrivals.

Chega lawmaker Rui Afonso said Portugal and different European countries were incapable to power entries, which generated a "feeling of insecurity" due to the fact that "we don't cognize their past."

Afonso added that European nations were ill-equipped to "decently" instrumentality successful immigrants who were sometimes "forced to unrecorded connected the thoroughfare and autumn into crime."

Among the protesters was Chega person Andre Ventura, whose enactment much than quadrupled its seats astatine this year's election.

Tensions surfaced arsenic the marketplace approached working-class neighborhoods with ample migrant populations. Some protesters engaged successful a standoff with pro-immigration activists successful favour of a Portugal unfastened to foreigners.

Posters speechmaking "No Portugal without immigrants" besides covered walls and autobus stops on the way of the march.

The fig of foreigners surviving successful Portugal jumped by 33.6 percent past twelvemonth to scope much than 1 million, astir one-tenth of the full population, according to the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum.

The center-right authorities toughened migration argumentation successful June. It scrapped a measurement allowing immigrants to use for regularization if they could beryllium they had been moving for astatine slightest 1 twelvemonth adjacent if they had entered the state illegally.