From Closed to Open Doors : Portuguese Emigration under the Corporatist Regime

Abstract

This paper analyses the Portuguese emigration policy under the corporatist regime. It departs from the assumption that sending countries are no more than by bystanders in the migratory process. The paper goes a step further, claiming that in the Portuguese case, not only did the Estado Novo (New State) control the migratory flows that were occurring, but that it used emigration to its own advantage. I tried next to present evidence to show that by the analysis of the individual characteristics of the migrants and of their skills, their exodus couldn’t have harmed the country’s economic growth during the sixties, since the percentage of scientific and technical manpower was, when compared to other European countries, far too scarce to frame an industrial labour force higher than the existing one. The paper concludes that during this period, the most likely hypothesis is that the Portuguese migratory flow was composed of migrants that were redundant to the domestic economy.