As a lawyer and entrepreneur who has spent years navigating labour migration systems on both sides of the Atlantic, one conclusion is unavoidable: Portugal is doing what the United States still only talks about. While Washington debates reforms and clings to a slow, paperwork‑ heavy model, Lisbon is building a more agile, market‑responsive framework that actually gets workers where they are needed.
The core difference is philosophical. Portugal treats labour migration as an economic policy tool; the United States largely treats it as a compliance problem. In Portugal, policymakers start with the labour market: which sectors are short of talent, how quickly can those gaps be filled, and what legal pathways will give employers predictable timelines? In the U.S., employers must first survive an obstacle course of forms, audits, and lotteries before a foreign worker can even think of starting a job.
Consider how each country responds to shortages in sectors like IT, construction, health care, and tourism. Portugal has created targeted visa routes and “fast‑track” channels tied directly to shortage occupations, with explicit service‑level expectations for processing. A job offer in a priority sector can translate into a work visa and first working day in roughly a month, allowing businesses to plan and execute projects on realistic time horizons.
The U.S. approach is the opposite of fast‑track. The standard employment‑based route requires a multi‑stage labour certification process that can drag on for a year or longer before an immigrant petition is even filed. That petition then enters another queue, followed by a final stage for either a green card interview or consular processing. For nationals of oversubscribed countries, the wait for permanent status can stretch into many years. Meanwhile, the H‑1B system injects randomness into hiring through an annual lottery, meaning even genuinely needed workers may never get a chance to contribute.
Portugal has not created a perfect system, and it would be a mistake to romanticize it. Recent tightening of broad “job‑seeking” visas reflects the political and social realities of housing pressure, integration capacity, and public sentiment. Yet even these corrections are happening within a framework that still recognizes a simple truth: if you want economic growth and demographic sustainability, you must align migration rules with labour‑market needs and make the path into the workforce predictable.
The United States faces many of the same structural challenges Portugal is trying to solve. Employers across America cannot find enough qualified talent, particularly in fast‑growing regions and industries. At the same time, the country is aging, birth rates are falling, and productivity depends increasingly on attracting and retaining mobile, globally minded workers. Instead of leveraging labour migration as a strategic asset, the U.S. system often drives talent elsewhere — with Portugal and other EU states standing ready to benefit.
None of this means that Portugal is “more generous” than the United States. It means Portugal is more intentional. It has accepted that the choice is not between migration and no migration, but between managed migration and unmanaged migration. By focusing on speed, clarity, and alignment with economic needs, Portugal has built a model from which the United States can and should learn.
If the U.S. wants to remain competitive, it must move away from a culture of suspicion and bureaucratic delay toward a culture of transparent rules and reasonable timelines. That does not require abandoning enforcement, security, or labour protections. It requires designing a system where employers can understand the rules, comply with them, and reasonably expect that qualified workers will be allowed to fill real jobs in a rational period of time.
Portugal’s story shows that this is not a utopian aspiration. It is a policy choice. The United States can keep exporting talent and opportunity to more nimble jurisdictions — or it can finally build a Labour Migration System that matches the needs of its 21st‑century economy.
Originally Posted: https://jonpurizhansky.medium.com/portugal-shows-the-united-states-how-labour-migration-should-work-31ee88e0a7f8?postPublishedType=initial
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