Portuguese communities abroad are praised, their achievements recalled, and words of gratitude repeated for the way they bring honour to Portugal beyond its borders. Yet behind every success story lies an uncomfortable question: why did so many Portuguese have to leave their own Country to find opportunities equal to their talent, their effort and their capacity for work?
According to the Emigração Portuguesa 2025 (Portuguese Emigration 2025) report by the Observatório da Emigração (Emigration Observatory), an estimated 65,000 Portuguese emigrated in 2024, five thousand fewer than in the previous year. Although there was a slight decline, the figures confirm the persistence of a structural phenomenon: tens of thousands of Portuguese continue to leave the Country every year.
This is not, then, a phenomenon belonging to the past, nor merely a memory of cardboard suitcases ("malas de cartão"), of ships bound for America or of clandestine crossings of the Pyrenees. Portugal remains a country of emigrants well into the twenty-first century.
The destinations, the professions and the qualifications have changed, but the underlying reason has not. Too many Portuguese do not find in their own land the conditions needed to build a dignified, stable and truly independent life.
Today, those who leave are often young, qualified and ambitious. Portugal funds their education, bears a substantial share of their training and, when the moment comes for them to contribute to national development, another economy reaps the benefit. The Country absorbs the cost of the training, while a foreign one receives the talent, the knowledge and the productive capacity.
Those who leave cannot be blamed. Every human being has the right and the duty to seek better conditions for themselves and for their family.The problem does not lie in the emigrant's decision, but in the system that turns departure into a necessity.
Portugal has grown used to celebrating its emigrants, but it rarely shows the courage to discuss the reasons why they keep leaving.
For decades, successive governments promised growth, modernization and convergence with the most developed economies in Europe.
Yet for a considerable part of the population, wages remain low, housing has become unaffordable, the tax burden stays excessive and bureaucracy hampers individual initiative.
In Portugal, working harder does not always mean getting ahead. Starting a company is still a test of administrative endurance. Hiring workers carries considerable costs. Investing means licences, opinions, regulations and delays. Saving is penalized, producing is taxed, and prospering is, far too often, regarded with suspicion.
A society that is suspicious of success will inevitably produce less wealth, less investment and fewer opportunities.
There is a deeper problem still: the fragility of a culture of merit. There are still sectors in which personal acquaintance counts for more than competence, in which party proximity prevails over ability, and in which obedience is rewarded more readily than independence.
When young people finish their studies and realize that professional advancement depends less on effort than on the right contacts, they naturally begin to look for another destination. When a business owner finds that more time goes into satisfying bureaucratic demands than into developing the business, the investment moves elsewhere. When a competent professional is offered abroad several times what they are paid in Portugal, saudade (the Portuguese longing for what is absent) is no longer reason enough to stay.
Emigration is, in this sense, a kind of silent referendum. Every citizen who leaves declares, through that decision, that they have stopped believing the Portuguese system can offer them the conditions to fulfil their potential.
Those in political office tend to respond with return programmes, temporary benefits and awareness campaigns. Such measures may help some individuals, but they do not solve the structural problem. The Portuguese will not come back for good simply because they are granted a passing tax advantage. They will come back when they find stability, competitive salaries, security, affordable housing and a public administration that respects citizens' time, work and money.
A country cannot depend on sentiment alone to win back those it has lost. Saudade may bring someone to visit Portugal, but only confidence in the future will convince them to return.
Emigration should be a free choice, driven by curiosity, by experience or by international ambition
It is equally contradictory to proclaim the need to attract foreign workers without first asking why so many Portuguese workers keep leaving. Portugal has the right to receive legal, controlled immigration compatible with its economic and social needs. The continuous arrival of foreign workers cannot, however, serve to conceal the failure to retain its own citizens, nor to sustain artificially an economic model built on low pay.
A truly developed economy does not compete through low wages. It competes through productivity, innovation, qualification, responsibility and the creation of value.
Portugal needs a transformation that will not come about through new speeches, observatories or committees. It needs to cut bureaucracy, ease the taxation of work and investment, reward merit, hold public officials accountable and create the conditions for private initiative to prosper.
It also needs to abandon the idea that the State should solve every problem in society. The State should guarantee justice, security, education, health and fair conditions of competition. It should not smother its citizens through dependency, excessive regulation and an administrative machine that grows while the productive population shrinks.
Every day, abroad, the Portuguese demonstrate that they lack neither intelligence, discipline, courage nor the capacity to adapt. Their achievements prove that the problem was never the Portuguese people. It lies, in large measure, in the conditions the Country itself offers its citizens.
The greatest tribute Portugal can pay its emigrants does not consist of speeches, ceremonies or words for the occasion. It consists of building a Country no one is obliged to leave in order to reach a better life.
Emigration should be a free choice, driven by curiosity, by experience or by international ambition. It should never be the only option for those who wish to work, raise a family and advance through their own merit.
For as long as Portugal continues to export its best prepared, most productive and most determined children, it may celebrate their victories abroad. But it should not forget that each of those victories is also an opportunity the Pátria (the homeland) failed to keep.
César DePaço
Businessman and Philanthropist
Consul ad honorem of Portugal from 2014 to 2020
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Summit Nutritionals International Inc.®
Founder and Chairman of the Board of The DePaço Foundation
Unwavering Defender of Law Enforcement and Conservative Principles
This is an opinion column by its author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the newspaper.