AIMA is losing its president again, and no successor has been named
Pedro Portugal Gaspar was called before Parliament this week for a seat on Portugal's Competition Authority board. He is the second AIMA president to leave since the agency replaced SEF in 2023, and the government has not said who comes next.
Pedro Portugal Gaspar is on his way out as president of AIMA, the agency that handles immigration and residency in Portugal. He was due before Parliament’s Economy and Territorial Cohesion Committee on Tuesday, 22 September — the hearing that comes before a formal appointment to the board of the Competition Authority.
Gaspar took over AIMA in July 2024 from Luís Goes Pinheiro, the agency’s first president, who had led it since it replaced the old Foreigners and Borders Service in October 2023. Before that Gaspar spent a decade, 2013 to 2023, as inspector-general of the Food and Economic Safety Authority, then a year as director-general for Consumer Affairs. He holds a law degree from the Portuguese Catholic University and a master’s in Administrative Law from the University of Lisbon.
No replacement in sight
Nobody has named a successor yet, and that is what worries the people who actually staff the agency. Manuela Niza Ribeiro, head of the Union of Migration Technicians, called it a sign of “political disorientation” and said AIMA needs stability, resources and leadership that understands the sector. The union is demanding an urgent appointment of someone with real migration experience, and points out that immigration already gets blamed easily for the state’s structural failures.
The timing matters. This is the same agency that promised to get closer to residents with a network of local offices and shorter waits, and that in June was announcing 90,000 renewals decided and digital proof-of-application documents to ease the queue. Swapping leadership for the second time in less than three years of existence, with nobody lined up to carry that work forward, is exactly the kind of interruption the union fears.
The government, for its part, has said nothing publicly yet about how or when it will pick AIMA’s next president. Gaspar’s move is not final either: after the parliamentary hearing, his designation still needs Council of Ministers approval. When AIMA gets a new name at the top, it will go into our AIMA tracker alongside the agency’s other changes.
Image: Andrés Monroy-Hernández / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
