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 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries an estimated 3.5 million people from all over the world said farewell to their native lands and traveled thousands of miles to start new lives in Brazil. Nowadays this trend has been reversed and hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have moved abroad, in some cases to the land of their ancestors.
According to the foreign ministry, 2.5 million Brazilians live outside the country. In 2004, these emigrants sent back US$ 2.5 billion in remittances. Whereas the European, Asian and Arab immigrants to Brazil were encouraged to come here, Brazil's emigrants are generally not welcome in their new homelands, with the exception of Japan, which has a system allowing people of Japanese descent to live and work legally. If you walk along São Paulo's Avenida Paulista on weekdays you will see hundreds of people queuing up outside the Italian consulate. Most are descendants of Italians who are trying to obtain Italian nationality, which they hope will give them unfettered entry to Italy and the European Union. The bureaucracy involved is expensive and complicated and the process can take years. The demand is high. There are an estimated six million Italians and their descendants in the city of São Paulo alone, 13 million in the state, making it the third-largest "Italian" city in the world after Buenos Aires and New York. The Spanish, Portuguese and German consulates are also kept busy processing similar applications. You will also find a lengthy queue outside the Mexican consulate in Rua Holanda in the nearby Jardim Europa district. This is not because Brazilians are trying to become Mexican citizens but because they are trying to get entry visas to Mexico, with the intention of then moving on to the United States. Most of these people are probably aiming to start new lives in the US as illegal immigrants. In 2005, the American immigration police arrested around 31,000 Brazilians who were trying to enter the US illegally, usually via Mexico. That is an extraordinary high figure and amounts to an average of 85 a day. Many are deported and, as soon as they get back home, start planning another way of trying to get into the US. Some never make it back at all and lose their lives wandering around in the desert until they die of thirst and exhaustion. To combat this trend, in October 2005, the Mexican government announced that Brazilians would no longer be admitted without visas. Hence the queues outside the Mexican consulate. The plight of illegal immigrants to the US was the subject of a TV soap opera called "America" which was shown on TV Globo in 2005. Full House The US also thinks it has enough Brazilians for the moment. In September, the American embassy in Brasília announced that Brazilians would no longer be able to take part in the annual lottery offering 50,000 Green Cards granting permanent residence status. The embassy said Brazil was no longer a country with a low rate of immigration. It said 61,850 Brazilians had been given legal residence permits between 2001 and 2005, thereby surpassing the limit of 50,000 Green Cards distributed over the previous five years. These legal immigrants include those who gained visas issued outside the US (including lottery winners), residents who had changed their status - after marrying Americans, for example - or who had received offers of employment. Japan is the second most popular destination for Brazilians and one of the few places which actively encourages them. However, the welcome mat is only out for Brazilians of Japanese descent or their relations. If you walk around the traditional Japanese district of Liberdade in São Paulo you will see notices from companies which recruit Brazilians to work in Japan. There are around 275,000 of these emigrants, who are known as "dekasseguis". They generally work as unskilled labor in auto part and electro-electronic factories and few of them speak Japanese. They often complain of being looked down and discriminated against. Although they meet the ethnic requirements, they are not always of full-blooded Japanese descent as the Japanese have mixed freely in Brazil. It is common to see Japanese Brazilians in the city of São Paulo with white husbands or wives while in the interior of the state they have mixed with people of white, Indian and black descent. Despite the discrimination they claim to suffer in Japan, these emigrants are in a regular situation and many of them return to Brazil after five or six years with enough money to buy a house or start a business. Closer to home, there are also an estimated 350,000 Brazilians living in Paraguay and a smaller number in Bolivia. Many of these are landless peasants and small farmers in frontier regions who have drifted into other countries rather than emigrated as such. They form a large part of the population in eastern Paraguay and have great influence there. The recent nationalization of assets of Brazilian and other foreign energy companies in Bolivia also led to threats by the Bolivian authorities to take over land which they said were being held illegally by Brazilians. Cheap Labor in Europe European countries with cultural and historical links to Brazil, such as Portugal, Spain and Italy, attract Brazilians but there are also large Brazilian communities in the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland. Even Ireland, long a country of emigration, has been attracting Brazilian immigrants. Most of these Brazilians have little to offer the host country except their manual labor. This does not mean that there are no educated and highly qualified Brazilian emigrants. At one time, there was a lot of resentment in Portugal about the large number of Brazilian dentists there but that problem was subsequently resolved. As anyone who has moved abroad knows, without legal status it is difficult to obtain a professional position no matter how many qualifications you have. Although there are some Brazilians holding high positions in multinational companies, such as Carlos Ghosn, the head of Renault, there are not many. This is not because Brazilians do not make good executives but because Brazil has few native multinational companies. This is changing as companies like the steelmaker, Gerdau, the Votorantim conglomerate and the mining giant, CVRD, buy up foreign assets. All three have substantial operations in the US and Canada but Brazilian businesses are still a long way behind European and American companies in moving abroad. Go-head Brazilian managers generally make their international careers working for foreign multinationals. Ghosn, for example, has spent practically his whole professional life abroad. It is not known how many of these immigrants in Europe are involved in the sex trade but there must be quite a few. Places like Germany, France and Switzerland are awash with young Brazilian girls working as go-go dancers or prostitutes. There are also lots of transsexual and homosexual prostitutes, particularly in Italy, France and England. A British cabinet minister, Peter Mandelson, lost his job some years back after the press revealed that he had pulled some strings to get a Brazilian friend's immigration status rectified. The "friend" turned out to be a rent-a-boy prostitute.
Foreigners in São Paulo As to immigration to Brazil, the official number of foreigners living here is put at 1.2 million, with the majority coming from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Japan and Argentina. This is probably an underestimate since many foreigners are living here illegally. This is obvious if you walk only a few yards from the Italian consulate in São Paulo to the Bolivian consulate where you will find dozens of Bolivian immigrants queuing up to get their documents in order. Mass immigration may have ended a long time ago but there is still a steady trickle of immigrants. Over the last 20 to 30 years, large numbers of Bolivians, Koreans and Chinese have entered the country, many illegally through the porous border with Paraguay. Most head for São Paulo. Some established Korean businessmen have been accused of exploiting the Bolivians, in particular, by hiring them for pittances to work long hours in sweatshops producing jeans and other clothing. Chinese gangs have become well established and make money by smuggling and intimidating law-abiding Chinese restaurant owners and shopkeepers. There have been a number of murders in recent years. One of the country's biggest smugglers is a Chinese-born, naturalized businessman who is currently in prison awaiting trial. The Lebanese civil war in the 80s and early 90s boosted the Arab population and there will probably be a further inflow of Lebanese escaping from the recent war with Israel. The long-established Lebanese community, with its powerful business and political connections, means that these Arabs generally have no problem in getting residential status. Out of Africa There are also small communities of Africans, mainly Angolans and Nigerians. The Angolans make up 80% of the 3,160 officially registered refugees in Brazil and many of them live in Rio de Janeiro. The Nigerians are easily spotted as they strut around the center of São Paulo talking noisily in English and Yoruba into their cellular phones. Some of these Nigerians are involved in smuggling drugs, using "mules", generally young people who swallow condoms filled with cocaine and take flights to Europe or South Africa. Nigerians have the dubious distinction of comprising the largest contingent of foreigners in Brazil's prisons. You might think that it would be easy for Brazilian police to spot Chinese, Korean and African criminals and arrest them, but bribery and corruption ensure that many remain free. An easy way for a foreign criminal to get a residential visa is to marry a local woman. The most famous criminal who used this method was the English train robber, Ronald Biggs, who spent 20 riotous years in Rio before old age and illness set in and he gave himself up and went back home to one of Her Majesty's Prisons. There are also an estimated 15,500 foreign executives who have special temporary residential visas. They generally work for multinationals and are passing through so cannot be considered as immigrants. Americans and British make up 25% of this contingent. It is unlikely that mass immigration will return in the near future. However, this could change in the decades to come if the country develops and becomes attractive again. This could be a great blessing to Brazil. The kind of inventive, entrepreneurial immigrant, particularly from Asia, who has done so much to boost the US economy in recent decades, may be just what this country needs. John Fitzpatrick is a Scottish writer and consultant with long experience of Brazil. He is based in São Paulo and runs his own company Celtic Comunicações. This article originally appeared on his site www.brazilpoliticalcomment.com.br. He can be contacted at jf@celt.com.br. © John Fitzpatrick 2006
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I think most of the population in Brazil, either out of ignorance or out of "inferiory complex", has a natural disdain for what's geniunely brazilian. I can indentify something similar in the english speaking countries towards asians. This fascination you have about asians is unexplainable.
Maybe if the US were in Asia and you had chinese crossing the border illegaly you would think of Mexico nd mexicans as examples of "what whatever country needs". Haha