Indians Have Invaded Portugal

In a small Portuguese town of 17,000 people, a protest erupted last year when locals tried to block construction of a mosque to accommodate the rapid influx of South Asian immigrants. The mosque was never formally built, but when a documentarian visited the town with Afonso Gonçalves, the 25-year-old founder of the political movement Reconquista, they found an informal mosque anyway—hiding in plain sight in a building that was definitely, according to the man who materialized at the door, "a playroom." This scene captures the central tension of Portugal's dramatic demographic transformation: over seven years, the country's foreign resident population exploded from 4% to roughly 15% of a nation of 10 million people, driven by an immigration pathway called the Manifestation of Interest that allowed non-EU residents to arrive on tourist visas, secure work contracts, pay 12 months of social security, and eventually obtain citizenship. The pathway was abolished on December 31, 2025, but by then roughly a million immigrants had arrived.

The Mechanism Behind the Numbers