Pedro Portugal Gaspar stated that the number of complaints has been decreasing considerably even though AIMA is dealing with a larger number of people.

At Évora he indicated the extent of the agency's workload over the past year, which had involved more than 600,000 appointments and over 500,000 residence cards being issued.

Gaspar admitted that with so many cases, things have a tendency to go wrong, since residence cards can have errors or be issued with the wrong address. Although he considers each complaint important, he thinks the general decline is proof that the situation is improving.

The Migration Technicians’ Union (STM) has a rather different explanation.

Is the number of complaints smaller, or has it become more difficult to make complaints?

The union argues that the fall does not necessarily mean people are having a better experience with AIMA.

Instead, it says some migrants are finding it increasingly difficult to reach the agency in the first place, citing unanswered emails, congested telephone lines, and lengthy waits for cases to be resolved.

The STM also states that certain residence permits are still taking longer than they should to be sent out, that some applications are still pending without any clear date for completion, and that some offices are either understaffed, have closed, or are operating with limited capacity.

It has cast doubt on AIMA's increasing dependence on the Local Migrant Integration Support Centres, the CLAIMs, for tasks which the union thinks should instead be carried out directly by the agency.

Rather than relying on complaint numbers alone, the union wants AIMA to publish more detailed information. That includes how many cases remain unresolved, average response times for different procedures, the number of appointments that fail to result in a completed process, errors on residence cards and the actual capacity of individual offices.

The figures have another complication

The data collected by the independent Portal da Queixa showed a different situation at the beginning of this year. In the first four months of 2026, it recorded 643 complaints against AIMA, which is 8.43% higher than the number recorded in the corresponding period of 2025, and by 27 May this figure had risen to 740.

The two sets of figures are not necessarily in conflict since they come from different complaint channels; nevertheless, they do make it more difficult to use a single headline figure as a simple indicator of whether people's experience with AIMA has improved.

AIMA has been undergoing considerable changes; as we mentioned earlier, the agency has expanded its staff this year and is bringing more residence procedures online as it attempts to get rid of the large backlog of applications inherited after SEF was closed.

A simple test for foreign residents who have to deal with AIMA would be how long it takes them to receive an answer, an appointment, or a residence card when these are actually needed.