Percepções e realidades face à Imigração...

[...] However, Portugal is sixteenth (on a list of twenty drawn up by the World Bank) in absolute terms as regards the receipt of finantial transfers from abroad sent by its emigrants, and, in global terms, it can be said that remittances sent to Portugal are something like five times higher than the volume made by immigrants in Portugal to their countries of origin.

It is very true that this distorted perception on the part of public opinion about the realities of migration movements is not exclusive to the Portuguese, as it is largely shared by European public opinion in general. (...) Furthermore, the dominant perception in Europe is that migratory movements are generally from developing countries and are directed towards developed countries - that is from south to north - while the reality is that only a third of the 200 million migrants actually correspond to this pattern whilst another third move from south to south, that is from one developing country to another, conferring a far more complex and diversified pattern onto migratory movements.

This disconnection between perceptions and reality in the domain of migration has come to imprison and distort the actual democratic debate about the significance and impact of migratory movements on contemporary societies especially in the countries of destination.

In order to avoid such a distortion of perceptions, it is important to understand better the reality of global migratory movements and to put the specific Portuguese case within the context of the transnational dynamics of migrants. This central preocupation was present in all the debates that took place under the aegis of the Gulbenkian Immigration Forum which, as it happens, opened with the presentation of the Portuguese version of the World Commission on Migrations and Development Report, set up by the United Nations Secretary General. Whose work was based on a High-Level Dialogue on the theme of international migrations which took place at the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 2006.[...]

in - Immigration: Opportunity or Threat?, António Vitorino (editor), Gulbenkian Immigration Forum, Principia, 2007, pág. 18.