Migrant talent saves Portugal from brain drain
- Written by Fernanda Seavon
- Illustration by Athulya Pillai
- Edited by Tina Lee and Ruby Russel
- Data analysis by Justin-Casimir Braun
- Data Vizualizations by Alice Corona
- Multimedia Editing by Gabriela Ramirez
With almost a third of young Portuguese living abroad, the country’s visa options and growing recognition of foreign qualifications help keep the economy on its feet. But despite so many immigrant workers coming from Portuguese-speaking countries, their degrees still don’t have the same clout as qualifications earned in Portugal.
The first time Ana Raquel Gouvêa Santos helped deliver a baby, she thought: “I want to do this for the rest of my life.” Five years into medical school, she had been struggling with the question of which specialization to pursue. Suddenly she had her answer.
Santos completed her residency at the University of Campinas in Brazil, where she specialized in gynecology and obstetrics and obtained her degree in 2006. For more than a decade, she practiced at Vera Cruz Hospital, a leading medical center in the heart of Campinas. At the same time, she completed postdoctoral studies in human reproduction, and taught theoretical medicine at a local university – while also pursuing advanced training in video-laparoscopic surgery.
Then, in 2020, Santos’ husband accepted a job abroad. The couple and their children joined the almost 800,000 foreign residents that live in Portugal. Turning her back on the security of a career that had gone from strength to strength, she now had to find her place among the foreign workers who make up 13 percent of the Portuguese labor force. Luckily, this wouldn’t prove as tough as it might have been elsewhere in Europe.
Portugal isn’t alone in drawing qualified migrants from around the world, but it stands out for doing better than most European countries at getting them into suitable employment.
Using data previously unavailable to journalists, Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with Unbias the News, the Financial Times, El Pais and other partners, has revealed the scale of brain waste in Europe. We found that migrants are almost twice as likely as natives to be unemployed, and half of all college-educated migrants are working jobs they are overqualified for. But of all the countries analyzed, Portugal is where college-educated migrants from the global south are most likely to have full-time jobs that fit their qualifications.
Portugal offers 14 different types of visa, five of which are designed for people who wish to live in the country. Immigrants on a similar path to Santos’ can take advantage of a “work-seeking visa,” to come to Portugal and then begin looking for a job, rather than securing a position before they arrive. And the country’s growing recognition of foreign diplomas boosts their chances of finding one.
Portugal automatically recognizes 382 foreign qualifications from 38 countries. Different forms of recognition – automatic, by level, and specific – follow different processes, but the DGES says applicants usually receive a response within 90 working days. It recognized over 26,000 individual qualifications between 2019 and 2023. And new policies are making some processes smoother. A decree-law passed in 2023 means that the medical degrees of doctors like Santos are now recognized at the same level as Portuguese equivalents.
Foreign medics to the rescue
Arriving mid-pandemic – before the law was passed – it took Santos 11 months to validate her Brazilian diploma. She also had to pass additional theoretical and practical tests before applying to the Portuguese medical association for a certificate of autonomy, which doctors need to practice medicine unsupervised. Now, she’s employed as a general practitioner at a private hospital while she works to validate her OB-GYN specialization.
According to a 2022 Migration Observatory report, more than 3,700 foreign doctors, nurses and operational assistants work in the Portuguese national health service (SNS). And with a shortage of native doctors applying to practice medicine, Portugal has good reason to ease their access to public sector healthcare jobs. In 2023, only 1,836 of the 2,242 open vacancies to train specialized doctors were filled, according to the Central Health Administration.
To make up the shortfall, Portugal has also signed health cooperation agreements with the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries and “reciprocity agreements,” as well as foreign professional associations. And this points to a major advantage Portugal has compared to most EU countries when it comes to integrating immigrants into the job market: the absence of a language barrier for so many new arrivals. Most foreign workers in the SNS are from Brazil, Angola – both Portuguese-speaking – or neighboring Spain.
Workers go, workers come
Claudia Pinheiro arrived from Brazil six years ago and now works as a relocation specialist. She has helped over 500 immigrant professionals organise their paperwork and connect with companies interested in hiring. Most of her clients work in tech or engineering – another sector where Portugal faces a shortage of native workers and automatically recognizes foreign qualifications.
Of her clients’ motives for relocating, Pinheiro says Portugal “has a good quality of life, it has quality education, it has a health system that works.”
Yet compared to many European countries, it has a relatively low human development index and GDP per capita. And at €820 a month (€860 as of January 2025), its minimum wage is well below that of its EU counterparts.
“Portugal has a growing economy and needs a lot of skilled labor, but it loses its national talent to the European market because of low wages."
Some 30 percent of Portuguese citizens aged between 15 and 39 currently live abroad – primarily in the UK, France and Spain – according to a report by the Emigration Observatory. The labor gap they leave is filled by skilled migrants from whom Portuguese wages are competitive with those of their countries of origin, Pinheiro explains.
With so many qualified Portuguese having quit the country, immigrants are now significantly more likely to have a college education than Portuguese natives. And the gap between native and immigrant rates of employment in regulated professions – 43.6 percent of college-educated immigrants, compared to 52 percent of college-educated natives – is smaller than in the other EU countries analyzed.
Yet for all its efforts to recognize foreign qualifications, these figures don’t mean Portugal doesn’t discriminate between a homegrown degree and a foreign one. In fact, for immigrants like Santos who earned their qualifications abroad, brain waste statistics are in line with the rest of Europe.
Homegrown credentials still trump global résumés
Claudia Silva arrived in Portugal in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree from the small city of Arcos in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. She quickly picked up her studies again, obtaining a master’s degree, a PhD in Digital Media, and then a postdoc in human-machine interaction. “A professional master’s degree was an excellent choice for me because it allowed me to enter the job market in Portugal,” says Silva, who is now an assistant professor of engineering at a public university in Lisbon.
Her experience reflects a trend: many migrants arrive in Portugal to study and stay in the country and work in the field they studied. But the unemployment rate for college-educated migrants nearly doubles if they did not study in Portugal.
And even Silva – who not only earned her master’s in Portugal, but also has an impressive academic résumé including teaching in the United States and an international prize for her academic writing – says her position is far from secure. Her previous job was at a different public university, where she was underemployed, working part time despite having completed her doctoral studies. She now works full time, but on a contract that’s up for renewal annually.
“I’m employed, but I consider it precarious. I have years of experience and training within Portugal and still don’t have a permanent position,” she says.
In Portugal, 68 percent of PhDs in tenure-track positions at public universities teach at the same institution where they earned their doctorate. “We need to diversify the teaching staff and create working and contractual conditions so that migrant professors feel that they really belong,” Silva argues.
For love or money
Portugal has Southern Europe’s smallest gap between the share of college-educated migrants and college-educated natives who are overqualified for their jobs. And immigrants from the Global South are less likely to be overqualified than those from northern Europe – which is true in only one other country that Lighthouse Reports analyzed.
Those who do end up in jobs below their education level are usually in white-collar roles – while in other European countries immigrants with degrees are likely to work as cleaners or personal care workers. But these figures don’t capture the nuances of individual immigrant experiences that are too complex to be easily categorized in terms of successfully validated diplomas, or professional versus white-collar employment.
Take Nayrem Pinto Gonzaga, who came to Portugal to pursue a master’s degree in physical education. The DGES did recognize Gonzaga’s existing educational qualifications – but she paid 500 euros to have them validated before discovering that a simpler, cheaper and faster form of recognition would have been adequate for her to teach physical education in Portugal. “When we arrive, the information isn’t clear. So I struggled a bit, because they don’t explain it very well,” Gonzaga says of the DGES.
She was then offered a full-time position as a schoolteacher – but on minimum-wage pay. She decided instead to take part-time opportunities in her chosen profession and supplement her income with side gigs, including taxiing people around Lisbon with a popular ride-hailing app. “I still work in my field, but I don’t earn as much so I end up having to work on other things,” Gonzaga explains.
Like Santos – who, more than four years after arriving in the country, is still working towards being able to practice her true vocation on a Portuguese labor ward – Gonzaga hasn’t ditched the ambitions she brought to Portugal, but she has had to compromise. “On one side, I work for money and the other I work for love,” she says.
About the author
Fernanda Seavon is a Brazilian journalist who reports on the intersection of culture, social issues, and technology. Her work has appeared in WIRED, Al Jazeera, Coda Story, and others.
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