Assembleia da República Tables 14:00 Vote on Three New Lei dos Estrangeiros Restrictions — PSD-CDS Pin Passage on Chega for the Student-Visa Gate, the Parents-of-Minors Clause and the Tacit-Approval Cut

The Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) votes at 14:00 on Thursday 11 June on a third tranche of restrictions to the Lei dos Estrangeiros (Foreigners Law), with the PSD-CDS minority bench openly counting on Chega votes to push the three-measure package across the finish line. The vote arrives roughly three weeks after the second tranche cleared the same plenary and folds into the trajectory that the XXV Constitutional Government has carried since taking office on the back of the 2025 legislative result.

The Three Measures on the Order Paper

The package put forward by Prime Minister Luís Montenegro and Minister of the Presidency António Leitão Amaro rests on three distinct restrictions:

• Student-visa gate. Foreign students enrolled in cursos profissionais (vocational programmes, ISCED 2011 Level 4) without a prior visto consular (consular visa issued by a Portuguese mission abroad) lose the right to file a residence-authorisation request from inside Portugal. The route had drawn Brazilian student inflow into the technical-secondary segment that escapes the higher-education visa track.
• Parents-of-minors clause. Immigrants who are parents of menores (underage children) lose the right to request residence on that ground if they entered without a visa, in what the proposal's exposé brands reagrupamento familiar disfarçado (disguised family reunification).
• Tacit-approval cut. The deferimento tácito (tacit grant) — under which a residence request was deemed approved if the agency missed the statutory decision deadline — is eliminated. The hook was load-bearing because the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA — Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) has tape-trailed cases at up to four years from filing, and some petitioners had begun to invoke the tacit clause to force documents.

The Arithmetic of the Vote

The PSD-CDS bench does not hold a working majority. The package therefore needs at least the abstention of Chega — and on the public record the far-right opposition has campaigned for harder restrictions than the government is asking for. The Socialist Party (PS) bench has signalled it will vote against on the three points, and Bloco de Esquerda, PCP and Livre have filed amendments to strike out each measure in especialidade (committee-stage detailed reading) if the generality passes.

The Numbers Behind the Politics

Portugal hosts more than 1.5 million legal immigrants on AIMA's count. Brazilian nationals are the largest single foreign cohort at roughly 500,000, and form the dominant share of the vocational-student route the first measure targets. The agency's case-handling backlog stood close to the half-million-pending mark earlier this year and the workforce strike in late May ran on the same processing pressure that the tacit-approval cut is designed to immunise against.

What This Means for Foreign Residents

• If you are on a vocational-course route: after the diploma is promulgated, you will need a consular visa secured before travelling to Portugal — the in-country residence-conversion path closes.
• If you are a parent of a Portuguese-born or resident minor and entered without a visa: you will lose the standing to file on the family-grounds basis under the new regime; the diploma operates prospectively, so already-filed requests are subject to transitional rules.
• If you have a pending residence file at AIMA past the deadline: the tacit-approval lever disappears — your remedy moves to administrative-court action against agency silence.
• Watch the President. António José Seguro promulgated the Nationality Law in May with a public reservation; a similar veto-or-promulgate window opens after the parliamentary vote closes.

The plenary opens at 14:00 in São Bento.