Migrant Workers and the Future of Portugal’s Care Workforce

A Portuguese residential service can have available beds yet be unable to use them fully because it cannot recruit enough workers. A Serviço de Apoio Domiciliário may face growing demand from older people who want to remain at home but struggle to extend its routes because vacancies remain open. At the same time, a newly arrived migrant may be willing to work in care but encounter language, housing, documentation, qualification-recognition or career-progression barriers that make long-term employment difficult.

These pressures increasingly intersect. Portugal is experiencing substantial population ageing while immigration has become an important source of working-age population and labour supply. Within the wider Portuguese ageing, long-term care and community support system, the question is therefore no longer simply whether migrant workers will contribute to care. The more important question is how Portugal can ensure that migration strengthens a stable, skilled and rights-respecting workforce rather than becoming a mechanism for filling difficult jobs without addressing why those jobs are difficult to retain.

The distinction matters. Portugal has comparatively limited formal long-term-care workforce capacity relative to its older population, while demand is expected to increase substantially. Migrant workers can widen the recruitment pool, bring valuable skills and sustain services in communities where domestic recruitment is increasingly difficult. But migration cannot compensate indefinitely for low occupational status, weak career structures, insecure employment or poor working conditions. A sustainable strategy has to improve the employment proposition for everyone working in care while giving migrant workers a genuine route into Portuguese society and the care professions.

Portugal’s demographic challenge is also a labour-market challenge

Population ageing affects long-term care twice.

First, it increases the number of people likely to need assistance with personal care, mobility, daily living, dementia, rehabilitation and other forms of continuing support. Second, it changes the population from which the workers providing that support must be recruited.

Portugal therefore cannot treat care demand and labour supply as separate policy questions.

The challenge is particularly visible in long-term care. Portugal has far fewer formal long-term-care workers relative to its population aged 65 and over than the OECD average. Much support continues to be provided by families, while formal services operate through a combination of social-sector organisations, private providers, the Rede Nacional de Cuidados Continuados Integrados and other health and social responses.

Expanding formal provision consequently requires more than funding additional places or services. Those services need people to operate them.

A new residential unit requires workers across every shift. Additional home-support capacity requires enough staff to cover dispersed routes. Expansion of community rehabilitation requires appropriate professional skills. Increasing support for people with dementia requires workers who understand cognitive impairment, communication and distress as well as practical care.

This creates a direct connection between Portugal’s demographic strategy and long-term workforce planning. If projected care demand rises faster than the available workforce, formal capacity will remain constrained regardless of the number of services policy intends to create.

Immigration has already changed Portugal’s labour supply

Portugal’s migration profile has changed significantly over recent years. Foreign-born residents now represent an important part of the population, particularly among working-age groups, and immigration has become a significant contributor to labour supply.

This matters to long-term care because care is inherently labour intensive.

Some productivity improvements are possible. Better scheduling can reduce wasted travel. Digital records can remove duplicate administration. Assistive technology may help people remain independent for longer. Remote support can extend professional reach in appropriate circumstances.

None of these removes the need for human relationships and practical assistance when someone needs help washing, dressing, transferring, eating, communicating or remaining safe at home.

Portugal therefore faces the same structural issue emerging across many ageing economies: the population requiring care is growing faster than the traditional domestic recruitment pool.

Migration can partially rebalance that equation.

It can bring younger working-age people into communities with ageing populations, increase the number of potential care workers and introduce skills acquired in other health and social systems. Migrants may also help sustain local economies and public services beyond long-term care.

But availability should not be confused with automatic suitability. A person entering Portugal in search of employment does not become a competent care worker simply because a vacancy exists. Recruitment needs to connect with training, language, supervision and appropriate employment conditions.

Care work needs to become a destination rather than a labour-market fallback

One of the central strategic risks is allowing migration to support care through occupational segmentation.

This occurs when migrant workers become concentrated in jobs that are difficult to recruit to because pay, security, status or working conditions are less attractive than alternatives.

The immediate effect can appear positive: vacancies are filled.

The longer-term consequence may be less sustainable. If migrant workers themselves move to better employment once they have established themselves in Portugal, providers return to the same recruitment problem. Turnover remains high, continuity suffers and recruitment becomes a permanent operational activity.

Portugal therefore has an interest in making care work sufficiently attractive that people choose to remain within it.

This involves pay, but not pay alone. Workers also experience the sector through:

• employment security and predictable income;
• working hours, shift patterns and travel requirements;
• physical and psychological workload;
• quality of supervision and management;
• access to training and recognised qualifications;
• opportunities to progress into more skilled or senior roles; and
• whether their work is socially and professionally valued.

These conditions matter for Portuguese and migrant workers alike. A migration strategy that ignores them risks continually replenishing an unstable workforce instead of creating a sustainable one.

Migrant recruitment is already part of a wider Portuguese labour-market transformation

Portugal has taken steps to reorganise migration and integration arrangements, including the creation of the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo, known as AIMA, and the development of a national Action Plan for Migration.

The wider policy objective extends well beyond care. Portugal needs working-age people across multiple sectors as population ageing changes labour supply.

That creates competition.

A migrant arriving in Portugal may potentially work in tourism, hospitality, construction, agriculture, logistics, cleaning, retail or care. Long-term-care providers cannot assume they will attract workers simply because migration increases.

The employment proposition matters.

This is particularly relevant for IPSS organisations and other care providers whose financial flexibility may be constrained by public cooperation arrangements, household contributions or wider service economics. Employers can find themselves competing for labour with industries able to adjust wages or conditions more quickly.

National workforce strategy therefore needs to connect immigration policy with the economics of care provision. It is difficult to improve recruitment sustainably if organisations responsible for delivering publicly important services lack the resources to improve the employment conditions on which retention depends.

A migrant worker’s first months can determine whether care gains a long-term professional

Consider a woman in her early thirties who moves to Portugal from a Portuguese-speaking country. She has experience supporting older relatives and previously worked in a community service, although her previous role does not map neatly onto a Portuguese occupational structure.

She finds employment in an ERPI operated by an IPSS near Lisbon.

Language is less of a barrier than it might be for another migrant, but the care environment is still unfamiliar. Documentation, infection-control procedures, medication boundaries, safeguarding expectations, manual-handling practice and organisational routines all need to be learned.

A weak employer could treat her previous experience as sufficient and place her quickly into understaffed shifts.

A stronger organisation treats induction as a safety and retention process. It assesses what she already knows, identifies gaps, provides supervised practice and explains escalation routes. She is paired initially with experienced colleagues rather than being expected to compensate immediately for workforce shortages.

Over time, the organisation discusses further training and progression. Her previous experience becomes an asset rather than an excuse to avoid development.

The operational difference is significant. Recruitment has not merely filled a rota line. It has begun converting an international recruit into a competent and potentially long-term member of the Portuguese care workforce.

That distinction should sit at the centre of workforce training in an increasingly diverse care sector.

Language is a care-quality issue, not simply an employment requirement

Communication is fundamental to long-term care.

A worker needs to understand what a person is asking, notice changes in speech or behaviour, explain what they are doing, respond to distress and communicate concerns accurately to colleagues.

Language therefore becomes part of care quality and safety.

The challenge is more nuanced than requiring workers to pass a generic language threshold. Everyday care includes colloquial Portuguese, regional accents, humour, indirect expressions, family language and terminology used by health and social professionals.

Communication can become still more complex where an older person has dementia, aphasia, hearing loss or cognitive impairment.

An older resident may revert increasingly to familiar language patterns or use expressions that a recently arrived worker has never encountered. A worker who is technically proficient in Portuguese may still need support to understand how that individual communicates pain, anxiety or preference.

Organisations therefore need practical language development embedded within work rather than treating language competence as a one-off recruitment gate.

Supervision, peer support, accessible documentation and opportunities to learn sector-specific terminology can strengthen both worker confidence and safety.

Multilingualism can also become an asset. Portugal’s population itself is becoming more diverse, meaning care organisations increasingly support older migrants and people from different cultural backgrounds. A linguistically diverse workforce can strengthen communication with some families and communities when deployed thoughtfully.

Qualification recognition can turn migration into skilled capacity

Portugal’s migrant population includes people whose existing skills are not fully used in the labour market.

For long-term care, this creates both a problem and an opportunity.

A migrant may have worked as a nurse, therapist, care professional or manager in another country but find that formal recognition of qualifications takes time or that their previous role does not correspond directly to Portuguese requirements.

Regulated professions appropriately require safeguards around professional recognition. Patient and service-user safety cannot be compromised simply because vacancies exist.

But unnecessary administrative delay can also waste valuable human capital.

A nurse whose qualification is awaiting recognition may work far below their skill level. Another worker may possess significant experience that is never systematically assessed. Overqualification can then coexist with workforce shortage.

The stronger opportunity lies in creating clear pathways that distinguish what must be formally recognised from what can be credited through training, competence assessment and supervised practice.

For care organisations, this requires better understanding of the skills already present within their workforce.

Workforce records should not simply state a person’s current job title. They can identify prior qualifications, languages, specialist experience and development aspirations. That information allows organisations to build internal career pathways rather than repeatedly recruiting externally for every higher-skilled vacancy.

Retention will matter more than recruitment volume

A care system can recruit thousands of workers and still experience a workforce shortage if people leave quickly.

Retention is therefore one of the most important measures of whether migration is genuinely strengthening Portugal’s long-term-care capacity.

Migrant workers may face pressures beyond those experienced by colleagues born in Portugal. Housing affordability can be particularly important in Lisbon, Porto and other higher-cost areas. Administrative uncertainty may create anxiety. Family networks may be overseas. Workers can encounter discrimination or social isolation. Some may remit part of their earnings to relatives abroad, increasing the importance of stable income.

These pressures interact with the normal demands of care work.

A worker completing physically demanding shifts while struggling with insecure housing and unfamiliar administrative processes is unlikely to experience employment in the same way as a settled colleague with an established local network.

Employers cannot resolve every aspect of migration policy or housing supply. They can, however, understand the factors affecting their workforce and avoid treating turnover as an unexplained statistic.

Analysis of retention and worker wellbeing should therefore distinguish where possible between roles, locations, employment arrangements and workforce groups.

The Predictive Workforce Risk Module can help organisations structure analysis of turnover, vacancies and continuity. It does not predict Portuguese migration flows, but the underlying principle is important: leaders need to understand why workers leave, not simply how many have left.

Home care exposes the interaction between migration, geography and working conditions

Serviço de Apoio Domiciliário presents particular workforce challenges.

Home-support workers operate away from the immediate support of a residential team. They travel between homes, manage changing schedules and often work around periods of peak demand in the morning and evening.

For a migrant worker unfamiliar with a locality, the practical barriers can be substantial.

Transport matters. A driving licence may not transfer straightforwardly. Public transport may be limited, particularly outside major urban centres. Workers may need to navigate dispersed rural communities while communicating with people whose speech and routines are unfamiliar.

These conditions make home-care workforce and scheduling inseparable from recruitment strategy.

Imagine an IPSS in the Alentejo that has recruited three new migrant workers to strengthen its SAD capacity. On paper, staffing has improved significantly.

In practice, only one worker currently drives. The service covers several villages. Public transport does not align with visit times, and experienced local workers are repeatedly assigned the longest routes because they know the roads and households.

The new recruits consequently cannot be deployed across the full service area without substantial support.

The organisation responds by redesigning induction around local routes, pairing workers during an initial familiarisation period and reviewing transport arrangements. Scheduling data identifies where excessive travel is reducing productive care time.

The scenario illustrates an important principle. Workforce capacity is not measured solely by headcount. A worker becomes usable service capacity only when skills, transport, confidence, supervision and local knowledge allow safe deployment.

Residential care creates different opportunities and risks

Residential care can offer a more structured environment for integrating new workers.

Colleagues are nearby. Supervision can be easier to organise. New recruits can become familiar with residents over time rather than travelling between multiple isolated settings.

But residential services also expose migrant workers to significant responsibility.

People living in ERPIs may have substantial frailty, dementia, mobility difficulties and multiple health conditions. Workers can encounter falls, distress, deterioration and end-of-life situations.

High vacancy levels can create pressure to move recruits into full responsibility too quickly.

This is precisely where workforce shortage can undermine safe recruitment. An organisation recruits because it lacks capacity, yet effective induction temporarily requires experienced workers to spend more time supporting the recruit. Under operational pressure, the temptation is to shorten that process.

Strong governance resists that temptation.

Induction and competence assessment need to be treated as part of safe staffing rather than administrative preparation before the “real” work begins.

For migrant workers, this should also include explicit explanation of professional boundaries and organisational expectations. Practices that were normal in another country may not correspond with Portuguese procedures. The purpose is not to assume that international experience is inferior, but to ensure that everyone understands the framework within which the service operates.

Migration should not create a two-tier care workforce

One of the most important ethical and operational tests is whether migrant workers receive the same employment protections and development opportunities as other workers.

Long-term care internationally has characteristics that can increase vulnerability: low occupational status, shift work, fragmented employment and, in some settings, informal or live-in arrangements.

Migrant workers can be particularly exposed where their employment, accommodation or immigration position creates dependence on an employer or intermediary.

Portugal therefore needs migration-supported care capacity to develop within clear labour protections.

Workers should understand their contracts, pay, hours, rest arrangements and rights. Recruitment practices should be transparent. Employers should know how workers were recruited and whether intermediaries are involved. Concerns about exploitation, discrimination or unsafe employment need credible reporting routes.

These are worker-rights issues, but they are also care-quality issues.

A workforce that feels unable to raise concerns is less likely to report unsafe practice. Exhausted workers are more likely to make mistakes. High turnover weakens relationships. Exploitative employment can create precisely the instability that migration was intended to solve.

The connection between fair work and responsible employment and service quality should therefore be explicit within Portugal’s long-term-care workforce strategy.

Cultural competence works in both directions

Discussion about migrant care workers sometimes frames adaptation as entirely the worker’s responsibility.

That is too narrow.

A worker certainly needs to understand Portuguese care expectations, language and social norms. But organisations also need to become competent at managing culturally diverse teams.

Workers may have different religious practices, dietary requirements, communication styles and expectations of hierarchy. Some may come from cultures where challenging a senior colleague is unusual. Others may have experienced healthcare or social systems organised very differently from Portugal’s.

These differences become operationally important.

If a worker is reluctant to challenge a manager, will they escalate a safeguarding concern? If a supervisor interprets indirect communication as lack of confidence, could a competent employee be overlooked for progression? If colleagues make assumptions about a worker based on nationality, how will management respond?

Cultural competence should not become a catalogue of stereotypes. Individuals cannot be reduced to their country of origin.

The stronger approach builds psychologically safe teams in which expectations are explicit, discrimination is addressed and workers are encouraged to ask questions and raise concerns.

This benefits everyone, including Portuguese-born workers and people receiving care.

Care relationships also require cultural continuity for older people

The person receiving care remains central.

Older people may initially find a changing or increasingly international workforce unfamiliar. Some have limited experience interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. A person living with dementia may respond anxiously to unfamiliar accents, appearance or communication patterns.

This does not justify discrimination.

It does require thoughtful care planning.

Consider an 87-year-old woman with dementia entering residential care in northern Portugal. She becomes distressed during personal care when several unfamiliar workers support her in quick succession. Two are recent migrant recruits.

It would be easy to interpret the problem as resistance to migrant workers.

A more careful assessment shows that the central issue is unfamiliarity and inconsistent routines. The woman responds better when the same small group supports her, workers use particular phrases familiar from her life history, and care is delivered at a slower pace.

The response is therefore continuity and person-centred communication rather than excluding workers because of nationality.

This reflects a wider principle within person-centred support for older people: workforce diversity and personal familiarity can coexist when services invest in relationships.

Professional development can convert recruitment into national workforce capacity

Migration becomes strategically more valuable when workers can progress.

If migrants remain concentrated permanently in entry-level roles regardless of capability, Portugal wastes potential talent and creates an occupational hierarchy that may become difficult to sustain.

Career development can take several forms.

A worker may become experienced in dementia support, rehabilitation or palliative care. Another may progress into supervision. Someone with previous healthcare training may eventually complete the recognition or education needed to practise at a different professional level.

Language competence can improve. Leadership capability can develop. Experienced migrant workers can become mentors for newer recruits.

This creates institutional memory.

Instead of migration functioning as a repeated inflow of inexperienced workers, it can progressively enlarge Portugal’s experienced care workforce.

That requires providers to see continuous professional development as a capacity strategy rather than an optional benefit.

National policy can reinforce this through accessible vocational pathways, recognition of prior learning and training structures that workers can realistically complete alongside employment.

Workforce diversity needs to be visible in governance data

Care organisations cannot manage workforce transformation through anecdote alone.

Leaders need information that shows whether recruitment strategies are producing sustainable capacity.

Useful indicators might include recruitment source, vacancy duration, retention, contract type, training completion, absence, progression and employee feedback. Where lawful and proportionate, organisations can also examine whether particular workforce groups experience materially different outcomes.

The objective is not to create intrusive monitoring of migrant employees. It is to identify structural patterns.

If migrant workers leave consistently during their first six months, something may be wrong with induction, housing circumstances, employment conditions or organisational culture. If they complete training but rarely progress, development pathways may need review. If one service retains international recruits far better than another, leaders can investigate what that team is doing differently.

The Quality Dashboard Builder can help organisations structure workforce and service indicators into clearer governance visibility. It is not a Portuguese regulatory framework, but it illustrates how operational data can be converted into management questions rather than simply accumulated.

Digital systems can make an international workforce easier to support

Digital capability can reduce some barriers faced by a more diverse workforce.

Mobile care records can standardise information. Digital learning can make training accessible across multiple locations. Scheduling systems can help new workers navigate home-support routes. Translation technologies may assist with limited administrative tasks or learning, although they should not replace the communication competence required for safe care.

Digital systems can also create new risks.

Poorly designed software may be harder for workers using Portuguese as an additional language. Automated translation can misunderstand clinical or care terminology. A worker who struggles with a system may develop informal workarounds that weaken record quality.

Technology therefore needs to be tested against real workforce capability.

Organisations planning significant change can use the Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment to consider workforce adoption alongside strategy and infrastructure. A technically successful implementation is still operationally weak if substantial parts of the workforce cannot use it confidently.

Migration policy and care policy need stronger strategic alignment

Portugal’s care workforce cannot be planned entirely within the long-term-care system.

Migration administration, labour policy, education, housing, transport and regional development all influence whether care providers can recruit and retain workers.

This becomes particularly clear outside major cities.

Imagine an IPSS in an ageing interior municipality that has repeatedly failed to recruit enough local workers. It is willing to employ international recruits and has suitable vacancies.

The problem is not simply finding applicants.

Affordable accommodation is scarce. Public transport is limited. The nearest larger town contains most administrative services. A worker arriving without a car may find daily life difficult even if the job itself is satisfactory.

The organisation could offer excellent induction and still lose recruits because the wider settlement infrastructure does not support them.

A more strategic response brings together the employer, municipality and local integration infrastructure. Information about housing, language learning, healthcare registration, transport and community support becomes part of successful workforce settlement.

The worker is no longer treated as labour imported to fill a vacancy but as a new resident whose ability to build a life locally affects whether the community retains its care workforce.

This is where migration, local employment and skills development and demographic policy begin to converge.

Portugal should avoid solving one country’s shortage by deepening another’s

International recruitment also raises a wider ethical issue.

Care workers do not appear from an unlimited global labour pool. Many source countries are ageing themselves or already experience shortages of health and care professionals.

Portugal therefore has an interest in responsible recruitment.

This is particularly important for regulated health professionals whose training may have required substantial public investment in their country of origin. Aggressive recruitment from systems with severe workforce shortages can transfer capacity rather than create it.

The issue is somewhat different for people who migrate independently and subsequently choose care employment in Portugal. Individuals have rights to mobility and employment, and responsible workforce policy should not restrict those choices simply because their skills are valuable elsewhere.

The relevant principle is proportionality.

Portugal can benefit from migration while also investing in domestic training, improving retention and avoiding workforce strategies based solely on extracting already scarce professionals from more vulnerable systems.

International recruitment should complement workforce development, not replace it.

Safeguarding workers strengthens safeguarding for people receiving care

Migrant workforce policy is sometimes treated as an employment issue separate from safeguarding.

In long-term care, the two are connected.

Workers who understand their rights and feel secure enough to raise concerns are better positioned to challenge poor practice. Workers dependent on an employer for employment, accommodation, administrative support or immigration stability may feel less able to speak openly if something is wrong.

Services therefore need accessible reporting routes and clear protection against retaliation.

Workers should understand what constitutes abuse or neglect within the service, how concerns are escalated and what happens after a report.

Language should not become a barrier to raising a concern.

Supervisors also need to distinguish performance problems from communication or induction issues. A worker struggling to understand documentation may require training rather than disciplinary action; equally, employers cannot ignore unsafe practice because a recruit is new to Portugal.

Consistent standards protect both workers and people using services.

This reinforces the wider importance of safeguarding training and workforce competence within an increasingly diverse care system.

Providers need to measure whether migration actually improves continuity

The strategic outcome of international recruitment should not be the number of migrant workers hired.

It should be sustainable care capacity.

That means asking whether recruitment has reduced vacancies, stabilised services, improved continuity and allowed additional people to receive support.

Consider a provider that recruits twenty international workers in one year. The headline appears positive.

Twelve months later, eight have left, four have moved into other sectors and several remaining workers are still concentrated in the least attractive shifts. Recruitment costs remain high and existing employees continue to cover gaps.

Another organisation recruits ten people but retains nine, develops two into supervisory positions and uses the additional capacity to extend its SAD operating hours.

The second organisation has recruited fewer people but achieved greater workforce value.

Governance therefore needs to follow the workforce pathway from recruitment through induction, competence, deployment, retention and progression.

Useful evidence includes:

• time required to fill vacancies and become independently deployable;
• retention at six, twelve and twenty-four months;
• training and competence outcomes;
• continuity experienced by people receiving care;
• progression into skilled or supervisory roles;
• employee experience and reasons for leaving; and
• whether recruitment has created measurable additional service capacity.

Those measures shift the conversation from migration volume to workforce sustainability.

The future workforce will need a broader definition of integration

Successful integration should not mean expecting migrant workers simply to assimilate into existing workforce problems.

It should mean creating a care sector in which people from different backgrounds can become competent, respected and established professionals.

That requires action at several levels.

National migration administration needs to be efficient enough that lawful workers and employers can navigate processes with reasonable certainty. Skills systems need to recognise previous learning while protecting professional standards. Care funding needs to support employment conditions capable of retaining workers. Providers need strong induction, supervision and progression. Communities need housing and infrastructure that allow workers to settle.

These requirements are mutually reinforcing.

A streamlined migration route is of limited value if care employment remains unattractive. Higher wages alone may not retain a worker who cannot find housing. Excellent training will not create continuity if contracts remain insecure. Recruitment to a rural service will not solve capacity if transport makes deployment impossible.

The strongest workforce strategy therefore treats migrant integration as a system issue rather than a recruitment transaction.

Migrant workers cannot substitute for reform of care work itself

Portugal’s most important strategic safeguard is to resist viewing migration as an alternative to improving the care sector.

International workers can increase labour supply. They cannot by themselves resolve weak career pathways, high turnover, fragmented training, difficult schedules or underinvestment.

Indeed, relying heavily on migration without improving those conditions could delay necessary reform.

A more sustainable model combines several approaches: retaining experienced workers for longer, attracting younger Portuguese workers, improving productivity where technology genuinely helps, developing existing staff, supporting family carers appropriately and welcoming migrant workers into good-quality employment.

This is also fairer.

Care should not become an occupation that a country struggles to persuade established residents to undertake but expects newly arrived people to accept indefinitely.

The social value of the work needs to be reflected in the quality of employment offered to everyone.

Portugal’s demographic circumstances make this increasingly urgent. As demand rises, the bargaining power of workers may also change. Providers that build a reputation for strong employment practice may become better positioned to recruit across both domestic and migrant labour markets.

What other countries can learn from Portugal’s emerging workforce challenge

Portugal’s experience reflects a wider issue across ageing societies.

Countries want to expand formal long-term care at the same time as the proportion of working-age people available to provide it comes under pressure. Migration consequently becomes an increasingly important part of workforce strategy.

The Portuguese context is distinctive. Its migration relationships, Portuguese-speaking international connections, social solidarity sector, labour market and long-term-care architecture cannot be transplanted directly elsewhere.

Several principles nevertheless have wider relevance.

Migration works best when it creates retention rather than repeated recruitment. Qualification recognition matters because countries can simultaneously experience labour shortage and migrant overqualification. Integration outside work affects whether workers remain in geographically difficult areas. Employment rights are part of quality assurance, not separate from it. Workforce diversity requires organisational adaptation as well as individual adaptation.

Most importantly, international recruitment is strongest when it supplements a credible domestic workforce strategy.

A country that improves the status, skills and sustainability of care work becomes more attractive to both domestic and migrant workers. A country that does not may remain dependent on continually finding new people willing to enter roles that others leave.

Conclusion

Migrant workers are likely to become increasingly important to Portugal’s long-term-care workforce as population ageing increases demand and immigration contributes a larger share of working-age labour. That creates a significant opportunity. International recruits can strengthen home support, residential care and other services, bring valuable skills and help sustain care infrastructure in communities where domestic recruitment is becoming more difficult.

But migration is a workforce resource, not a substitute for workforce reform. Its value depends on what happens after recruitment: whether workers receive effective induction, develop language and care competencies, work under fair conditions, have previous skills recognised, can progress professionally and are able to build sustainable lives in Portugal. The strongest evidence of success will therefore be retention, continuity and increased service capacity rather than recruitment numbers alone.

Portugal’s strategic task is to connect migration policy with care funding, vocational development, employment quality, housing, regional planning and organisational governance. Doing so would benefit migrant workers without creating a separate workforce strategy for them. It would improve the underlying employment model for care itself.

As Portugal develops the formal services required by an older population, the central workforce question is not simply where future workers will come from. It is whether care can become an occupation in which people arriving from Portugal or elsewhere can build skilled, respected and sustainable careers. That is the foundation on which migration can make a durable contribution to long-term care.