António Leitão Amaro has delivered the cleanest possible victory over administrative failure by simply narrowing the definition of what still counts as failure. The minister informed parliament that only 5,000 of the original 445,000 cases remain unresolved, allowing the expanded staff of 850 to concentrate on family-reunification and golden-visa files after clearing 98 percent of 940,000 notifications. Success now arrives in the form of whatever the agency has decided not to measure anymore.
Leitão Amaro, when the same agency spent years promising the same outcome, at what point does “nearing clearance” become indistinguishable from “stop asking about the rest”? The minister cites 55,000 family-reunification appointments and 26,000 permits already issued this year, comfortably above the prior annual average of fewer than 20,000, plus 30,000 golden-visa appointments from 46,000 pending cases and 6,000 decisions reached. The slide deck looks finished; the line outside the office does not.
The sequence resembles a municipal road crew that first lets every pothole form, then adds two extra workers, then declares the street repaired because the remaining craters have been moved to a different budget line. Each step registers as improvement until the next cohort of applicants encounters the identical delay under a fresher label.
The remaining 5,000 cases now sit beside 46,000 golden-visa files still in motion. Appointments granted this year already exceed earlier totals, yet the total volume of pending matters across categories has not disappeared. The minister’s arithmetic treats the reallocation of limited desks as proof that the original problem has been solved rather than relocated.
An ordinary household utility bill arrives every month with the same due date no matter how many prior invoices the company claims to have settled. AIMA’s clearance follows the same logic: the headline number drops while the queue length stays roughly constant. The minister has solved the visible backlog by shifting the remainder into categories the agency now prefers to emphasise.
The same parliament that received the update continues to hear complaints from applicants whose files predate the workforce increase from 723 to 850. Every new family-reunification appointment simply joins the queue the previous backlog once occupied. The minister’s claim therefore rests on the narrow definition he chose to defend.
Five thousand cases remain on the books that once held 445,000. The rest have been reclassified or moved to the next set of targets the agency is now funded to pursue.