AIMA's First-Half Scorecard Is Four Percentages Deep, and the Single Absolute Figure It Publishes Is the Number of Compliments

The Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum), the body every foreign resident in Portugal knows as AIMA, published its first-half service figures on Friday. The release runs to five short sections and contains four percentages. It contains exactly one absolute number, and that number is the count of compliments.

What the agency says is this. Between January and June 2026, effective appointments held at the Lojas AIMA, the agency's walk-in service shops, grew by "more than 60 percent" against the same months of 2025. Complaints fell 35.8 percent. As a share of appointments actually held, complaints dropped from an average of 6.9 percent in 2025 to 2.7 percent in 2026. And the shops recorded "an average of around 32 compliments per month".

The three percentages check out

They are worth testing against each other, because percentages published without a denominator often are not consistent. These are. If the complaint rate falls from 6.9 to 2.7 percent, it has dropped to 39.1 percent of its old level. If complaints themselves fell to 64.2 percent of their old level over the same months, appointments must have risen by a factor of 0.642 divided by 0.391, or 1.64. The agency's own figures imply effective appointments rose about 64 percent, so "more than 60 percent" is accurate and slightly conservative.

That is a real result and deserves to be recorded as one. It is also the point at which the release stops.

What a percentage without a denominator will not tell you

Nowhere does the communiqué say how many appointments were held. Sixty-four percent more of an unpublished number is still an unpublished number. Nor does it give the volume of complaints, the pending caseload, or the wait between requesting an appointment and being given one.

The wording matters too. "Atendimentos efetivos" means appointments that actually took place. Every figure in the release is calculated over people who got through the door. Someone who never secured a slot at all does not appear in the numerator or the denominator, and cannot lodge a counter complaint about an appointment they were never given. The metric that improved is a measure of the counter, not of the queue.

One caveat runs in AIMA's favour and the release does not claim it. During the same half year the agency joined the Livro Amarelo Eletrónico (Electronic Yellow Book), the state's digital complaints channel, widening the ways a citizen can complain in the middle of the period being compared. Opening a new channel normally pushes recorded complaints up. The recorded fall happened anyway.

Sixty-four percent more work, seventeen percent more staff

Set the figure beside the one the agency published eight days earlier, when it put its two-year headcount growth at 17 percent and the Sindicato dos Técnicos de Migração (Migration Technicians' Union) replied that 19 percent of staff had left over the same stretch. Roughly 64 percent more appointments delivered on roughly 17 percent more people is a very large productivity claim. The release does not make it, examine it, or say whether appointment slots were shortened to get there.

The accounts from outside the building have been describing the parts these percentages do not reach: lawyers queuing before dawn at a Lisbon office for half an hour of service, and a record 55,000 family-reunification bookings that practitioners say convert into residence cards fewer than three times in ten. Both of those are also throughput figures. They point the other way.

Publishing the arithmetic behind a 64 percent improvement would cost AIMA nothing, and it would settle the argument. Publishing 32 compliments a month settles none of it.