structural:reformatting
Immigration

As of 2023, Portugal has 10,639,726 inhabitants, of whom about around 1,040,000 are legal resident foreigners, albeit the 2023 numbers are still provisional. Resident foreigners now make up approximately 10% of the population. These figures do not include Portuguese citizens of foreign descent, as in Portugal it is illegal to collect data based on ethnicity. For instance, more than 340,000 resident foreigners who have acquired Portuguese citizenship between 2008 and 2022 - and thus constitute around 3.27% of the country's population in 2022 - are not taken into account in immigration figures as they are Portuguese citizens. In 2022 alone, almost 21,000 foreign residents acquired Portuguese citizenship, of which 11,170 were female and 9,674 were male.

Portugal, long a country of emigration (the vast majority of Brazilians have Portuguese ancestry), became a country of net immigration. The influx of immigrants didn't come just from the last Indian (Portuguese until 1961), African (Portuguese until 1975), and Far East Asian (Portuguese until 1999) overseas territories but also from other areas of the world as well. Even though in the aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Portugal's emigration rate has increased and stood at 6.9‰ as of 2022, it was still below the immigration rate of around 11.3‰. It is also noteworthy that nowadays the overwhelming majority of Portuguese emigrants are leaving the country for short time periods, with 56.8% of those having left the country in 2022 doing so for less than a year.

Since the 1990s, along with a boom in construction, several new waves of Ukrainian, Brazilian, Lusophone Africans and other Africans have settled in the country. Romanians, Moldovans, Kosovo Albanians, Russians, Bulgarians, and Chinese have also migrated to the country. The numbers of Venezuelan, Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi migrants are also significant. Moreover, Portugal's Romani population is estimated at 50,000.

It is estimated that over 30,000 seasonal, often illegal immigrants work in agriculture, mainly southern cities such as Odemira where they are often exploited by organized seasonal workers' networks. These migrants, who often arrive without due documentation or work contracts, make up over 90% of agricultural workers in the south of Portugal. Most are Indo-Asians, from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. In the interior of the Alentejo there are many African workers. Significant numbers also come from Eastern Europe, Moldova, Ukraine, Romania and Brazil.

In addition, a number of EU citizens, mostly from Italy, France, Germany or other northern European countries, have become permanent residents in the country. There is also a large expatriate community made up of Britons, Canadians and people from the United States of America. The British community is mostly composed of retired pensioners who live in the Algarve and Madeira.

A National Statistics Institute (INE) study, conducted between 2022 and 2023, found out that 1.4 million people, (13% of the population), have immigration background, in which 947,500 are first generation immigrants, concentrated mainly in the Lisbon metropolitan area and the Algarve. It is noteworthy that the survey was only carried out amongst people living legally in the country for at least one year at the time of the interview and that in 2022 the statistical office figures suggested that 16.1% of the country's population or 1,683,829 people were first generation immigrants.