The vast scale of the fields and plastic covers
The landscape of the southwest of Alentejo has transformed profoundly in recent decades with the expansion of intensive irrigated agriculture. In 2025, data put forward by the Association of Horticulturists, Fruit Growers and Floriculturists of Southwest Alentejo (AHSA) show that the sector occupies around six thousand hectares of productive land. This agricultural expanse, dedicated mostly to red fruits, vegetables and ornamental plants, generates an export volume valued at 500 million euros nationwide.
To sustain this intensive production, between ten and fifteen thousand immigrant workers pass through the territory annually, according to AHSA records for 2025. The dependence on this external labor force structures the current business model in the sub-region. In 73% of agricultural companies surveyed in the 2025 regional barometer, more than half of the jobs are filled by foreign citizens, ensuring the continuity of harvests in the face of a scarcity of national workers.
The intensity of this labor integration reaches even higher levels in specific segments of the local business fabric. According to the same 2025 AHSA study, in 45% of the evaluated farms, foreign workers account for more than 75% of the total workforce. For 83% of business owners in the agricultural sector in the region, these workers are considered formally fundamental to the economic success and viability of the activity in the territory.
The geographies of origin and pressure on farms
The demographic composition of this workforce reflects well-defined global migration networks that converge on the Alentejo fields. According to data released by AHSA in 2025, Nepal leads in isolation as the origin of immigrant workers on the region's farms, being mentioned by 86% of the surveyed companies. Added to this community are significant flows originating from India, pointed out by 48% of the farms, and Thailand, registered by 41% of the companies in the same period.
Faced with a chronic shortage of housing solutions in the towns and villages of the coast, the burden of the response has fallen partially on the business fabric. AHSA data referring to 2025 indicate that more than 20% of the surveyed agricultural companies made investments exceeding one million euros in their own housing solutions to accommodate their workers. However, the majority of companies in the sector, corresponding to 35% of the total, limited themselves to investing up to 50 thousand euros in housing infrastructures.
These asymmetries in business investment help to understand the scale of the housing problem recorded on the ground. The unavailability of adequate accommodation for workers was pointed out as a critical obstacle by 62% of agricultural business owners in the 2025 AHSA survey. For a comparative scale, while the sector debates these gaps, the National Statistics Institute (INE) estimated that the resident population in Portugal reached 10.75 million people at the end of 2024, highlighting a national demographic pressure that is acutely reflected in local dynamics.
Institutional divergence and conditions on the ground
The official quantification of the immigrant population faces complex bureaucratic and methodological obstacles that hinder public management at the local level. In public statements released in May 2026, the Portuguese Government, through the tutelage of the Presidency, admitted that official statistical data from INE and operational records from AIMA present discrepancies inherent to their respective counting criteria. These divergences between census estimates and administrative residence permits create a gap in the statistical visibility of these workers.
On the operational planning side of hiring, the Confederation of Portuguese Farmers (CAP) confirmed in 2025 the submission of processes through the consular fast-track model for attracting foreign labor. However, the employers' confederation itself publicly warned that this fast-track system only works strictly if there is a prior and effective guarantee of dignified accommodation for seasonal workers, linking legal regularization directly to the physical infrastructure available in the territory.
Consequences of the lack of structured housing translate into situations of extreme vulnerability documented by supervisory entities. Inspections carried out by the Authority for Working Conditions (ACT) and various social reports published at the beginning of the decade, notably in 2021, have documented critical cases of housing overcrowding and extreme precariousness in informal housing used by migrants in Alentejo, contrasting with the long-term integration aspirations expressed by a significant portion of the workers.
The myth of administrative control and alternative models
The most obvious reading would assume that the municipality of Santiago do Cacém and neighboring territories of Alentejo Litoral possess consolidated, uniform and updated census and administrative data on the totality of the seasonal foreign labor they employ. The common assumption dictates that if companies operate legally and export hundreds of million of euros, the accommodation and registration of each worker would be perfectly accounted for by local and central authorities in accessible databases.
However, the facts demonstrate a strong institutional contradiction that shatters this apparent statistical security. On one hand, agricultural confederations report between 10 to 15 thousand active seasonal workers annually in the southwest axis alone and heavy private investments; on the other hand, official INE statistics and AIMA records diverge due to temporal and effective residence criteria, while field reports show that a substantial portion of workers live in informal spaces not accounted for by traditional Censuses.
To try to overcome this structural impasse between economic reality and housing scarcity, the business association AHSA initiated formal negotiations in 2025 with the Government and local municipalities. The objective is to replicate in Alentejo the Spanish model of collective residences for seasonal workers, similar to the Tariquejo project implemented in Huelva, seeking to mitigate through new collective typologies a deficit that the traditional local rental market cannot absorb.
Integration prospects and permanence profile
The permanence of these workers in the territory is not strictly limited to a short-duration seasonal passage, revealing deeper integration dynamics. According to data from academic research and the Migration Observatory published in 2021, approximately 31.8% of foreign workers surveyed in the Alentejo agricultural sector express a clear desire to maintain long-term integration in the activity, anticipating periods exceeding five years in the region.
In the opposite direction, the same 2021 Migration Observatory study points out that about 15.2% of immigrant workers employed in regional agriculture anticipate staying in the agricultural sector strictly until they obtain formal legal regularization and the respective residence permit, using the primary sector as a gateway to other geographical or professional mobilities in Europe.
In terms of productive specialization and personnel allocation, field work in regional agriculture concentrates the vast majority of foreign citizen jobs, with about 20% of workers assigned to connected and essential branches such as nurseries and greenhouses, according to sectoral research data from 2021. The future of these communities and the economic sustainability of Alentejo Litoral depend directly on the ability to reconcile the volume of agricultural exports with the effective creation of lasting housing infrastructures.