NEW YORK – Portugal’s consul-general in New York, Luisa Pais Lowe, told Lusa news agency that “Portugal is in fashion” in the United States and that there are more and more people in this country wanting to move to Portugal, therefore increasing the demand for visas.
In a review of her first few months overseeing the consulate-general in New York, Pais Lowe said that she used the summer months to catch up on a backlog of work, including civil registration processes, nationality applications and visas.
“It was a very useful six months of learning and getting to know the community and its value,” she said of Portuguese nationals living in the region. “They were six months in which I carefully planned the creation of the conditions to, for example, take the consulate to Portuguese clubs, but also other strategic action initiatives in the economic and cultural areas, which are also part of our mandate.”
According to Pais Lowe, civil registration and nationality cases were the ones that accumulated the most backlogs.
“We also have a very large demand for visas, because we know that Portugal is in fashion and there are more and more Americans or residents in the United States who want to move to Portugal,” she said. “Therefore, we have registered a very large increase in work in the area of visas and it was basically on these two aspects that we were working.”
The number of US nationals residing in Portugal is at its highest level in over a decade, according to data from the country’s Immigration and Borders Service (SEF) cited by Jornal Económico. At the end of 2021, there were 7,000 people born in the United States registered as living in Portugal, twice the number of three years earlier.
Portugal’s consulate-general in New York, which is considered to be strategic, has a mandate that includes not only the provision of consular services, but also a whole range of support work to promote the country in the areas of business and entrepreneurship, culture and the Portuguese language, working closely with AICEP, the investment and foreign trade agency, the national tourist board and the Camões – Institute for Cooperation and Language.
Some six months after she took office, Pais Lowe told Lusa, the consulate is at a level where “work arrives and is done, not accumulated” and considered it “gratifying to see the joy and gratitude” with which the consular team is received whenever it travels to cities far from central New York.
