Lilian Kopke came to study piano in Portugal in 1987 and ended up becoming a teacher at the Escola Artística de Música do Conservatório Nacional, where she only has good memories — especially of the students and teachers she met and the artists she met.
He arrived as a tourist, because he never obtained a student visa from the Portuguese Consulate in São Paulo, where he lived. Afterwards, he started from scratch, continuing to enter the country as a tourist and asking for a residence permit from the then SEF.
In addition to her passport, she presented a request for a residence permit, which was not enough, for example, to become legalized at the Caixa Geral de Aposentações, since she was a teacher at a public institution.
How did you manage to become legal and work for the State?
He managed to resolve the situation with the Brazilian Embassy in Portugal, which allowed him to obtain a residence permit.
“At that time, there were four or five Brazilians here and I went to meet the Brazilian ambassador. They managed to interfere and I obtained a residence permit visa and, two years later, permanent residence visa.”
This authorization is renewable every five years, and that is what Lilian did until January 2020. Her authorization expired on January 15th of this year, but, despite efforts and appointments to renew the document, she has still not been able to do so.
“My number does not exist”, says AIMA
Despite several attempts, AIMA responded to previous requests, which had accumulated in the meantime. When he found out that they were processing requests for authorizations that expired in 2025, he contacted the services and was told that “there is no resident letter with that number”.
“They say it doesn’t exist,” he said, indicating that he repeated the request three times, always getting the same answer. “My number doesn’t exist”, he said. The insistence was such that he was no longer able to make new orders using his email.
“Of [19]88 until 2020, every five years, I always renewed. And despite that, now I can’t,” he lamented, adding that he calls the AIMA number, but no one answers — just as they don’t respond to the emails he sends.
Without valid documents and with life on hold
The result is that, whenever the authorization expires, you no longer have access, for example, to banking applications and are permanently alerted to the fact that you have invalid documentation.
“That implies everything. You know that, for anything you want to do, you have to present your identification document. If the date is expired, the document is invalid. And it was like that, one after the other. First it was the Caixa Geral de Aposentações, then the lease contract — which also requires a valid document — and it’s difficult to explain,” he said.
As the Government extended the deadline for residence permits, it remained in force until June 30th and then until October 15th. Currently, there is no way to see the renewed documents, since, for the immigration services (AIMA), their authorization does not exist.
“I feel like a hostage to AIMA”
He feels “hostage to AIMA” and is afraid to travel, because, if in Portugal the delays of this organization are known, at other borders “they don’t want to know”.
Lilian has two children born in Portugal, both with Portuguese nationality, and is too tired to continue insisting on staying in a country where the environment, she says, is increasingly hostile to immigrants.
He states that he does not feel comfortable “in this anti-immigration environment”, because he is an immigrant, even though he has lived in Portugal for 40 years, the country where he worked for the State for 37 years.
“I’m grateful to Portugal, but the environment has changed”
“I am very grateful to Portugal, because I raised my children, educated them here, in a very calm environment, without the violence and crime of São Paulo.”
“While there wasn’t a party here that institutionalized racism — which was Chega — things weren’t like that. People might have had that feeling, but they had no way of expressing it in such a violent way,” he said.
Lilian Kopke recalls that Brazil also had a Bolsonaro and that “it takes time for people to come to terms with reality”. But he assumes that his future involves returning to his country, carrying with him the memory of the “wonderful students” he had and the singers he worked with.
“Those are the things I’m going to take from here, that’s not what’s happening now. I made a lot of friends and I was very lucky to meet people who, in a way, made me feel more included,” she said.