Pandemic Exposes Plight of Portugal’s African Migrants

Neide Jordão shoves a broken refrigerator and a stack of bags with dirty laundry to the side as she makes her way out of her tiny apartment in an unfinished brick building. Living with her three sons, two daughters, a sister, and 63-year-old mother, Jordão, 35, sleeps on a couch and struggles with chronic breathing problems caused by the moisture from leaking water. She emerges onto an unpaved street in Lisbon lined with battered cars and ramshackle sheds.

The scene is more evocative of the poverty she escaped from as a child in Africa than of the capital of one of Europe’s former colonial powers. “I feel like we’ve all been forgotten—it’s painful,” says Jordão, trying to tidy up among the debris of discarded furniture and cardboard boxes outside her home. “I often wonder if we’d be better off back in Angola.”