3 - Making Claims and Taking Action

Summary

This chapter looks at the migrants not as objects of the state’s integration measures but as political subjects making claims in demonstrations, migrant associations, the parliament, and media outlets. It discusses how the government defused much of the returnees’ protest, initially perceived as a serious menace, through a pervasive rhetoric of national integration and the framing of migrant mobilization as a form of "apolitical politics." It further asks how migrants built their own associations, to what degree they were bound up with the political right, and why they ultimately proved to be politically weak and short-lived. In short, the chapter looks at how the voices of the returnees, while distinctly present directly after their arrival, were coopted, absorbed, and covered up by the emerging institutions of Portugal’s representative democracy, the kind of concessions the political class was ready to make along the way, and some of the legacies of this process.