Shaping Brazil: the role of international migration

Migracion, 1961

Anais do XXIV Iussp General …, 2001

Vibrant, 2013

In this text I analyze some of the conceptual and subjective meanings of the notion of immigration, observing how these are appropriated in the debates on foreign colonization that influenced immigration policy in Brazil during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. I also discuss everyday representations of immigration contained in writings by German immigrants sent to colonize areas of southern Brazil, exploring the liminal identity that emerges as a result of the difficulty experienced settling in still untamed areas of Brazil. The text examines understandings of immigration more directly associated with the colonization process promoted by the Brazilian state, still included in the 1945 Law of Foreigners, through which large areas of uncultivated lands in the south of the country were occupied by European immigrants (and their descendants) in the form of family smallholdings. Under these circumstances, German immigration preceded other flows of migrants, despite Brazilian nationalistic concerns over assimilation.

"European and Asian Migration to Brazil," in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, paperback edition 2010), pp.208-214.

The American Historical Review, 2014

The immigrant's life is defined by transition and uncertainty. Among a number of countries in the Americas, Brazil has long represented a land of promise and plenty to people around the world. In the United States, the myth of the Promised Land meant that the host country improved the individual lives of migrants. By contrast, Brazil, the Country of the Future, encouraged foreigners to improve a nation burdened by legacies of Portuguese colonialism and African slavery. Although the reality people encountered often betrayed the initial optimism evinced in the refrain above, immigrants have come to Brazil for centuries, creating opportunities and constructing new communities. Arriving from an array of countries, they fundamentally changed Brazilian identity in unexpected ways. Lesser's new work is a masterful appraisal of these diverse communities, and his book broadly surveys the history of immigration in Brazil since the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in 1808. Forced to flee the Napoleonic invasion consuming the Iberian Peninsula, the Portuguese king, Dom João VI, became an immigrant himself in a new and foreign land. On arrival, he immediately opened Brazil's economy and culture, planting the seeds for future migration. Although Lesser consciously elects to focus on immigrants who were agents in their migration (11), he repeatedly notes how legacies of slavery and domestic race relations heavily shaped the tenor of official immigration policy. Roughly 45 percent of all African slaves in the New World were forcibly settled in Brazil. As elites confronted independence and the gradual abolition of slavery, they nervously eyed a historical juncture where whites would be outnumbered and no free person would choose to work under the same miserable conditions that bound the slaves. State policy was subsequently developed to "whiten Brazil" by increasing European immigration. The principal objective among landowning elites was the replacement of slaves with a "servile" colono (sharecropper) population to work in the fields. Public officials were sent abroad to actively recruit potential migrants and promote the country as an ideal opportunity, despite the popular perception that Brazil was "a disease-infested jungle with little economic opportunity" (33). Fazendeiros could be so abusive to their immigrant employees that emigrant nations actively discouraged or prohibited further migration to Brazil. Due to these circumstances, Brazil generally attracted fewer migrants than the United States, Argentina, or Canada. Nevertheless, mass migration soon followed and, much to the chagrin of the fazendeiros, these new Brazilians were not passive additions to their environment.

Routledge eBooks, 2022

Brazil is no longer condemned to be the " country of the future. " After six presidential elections over the past quarter century, the world's third-largest democracy and sixth-largest economy now has nearly twenty years' experience with low infl ation and a level of political stability that few countries in the world can match. Although some of the highest inequalities in the world remain, the Brazilian middle class has grown dramatically over the past decade to become the single largest socioeconomic group. Self-suffi cient in petroleum and on the verge of exploiting some of the planet's largest and deepest offshore oil fi elds, Brazil has also become the world's greenest large economy, with nearly three-quarters of its energy provided by hydroelectricity and biofuels. In 2014 the country will host the World Cup, and in 2016 Rio de Janeiro will follow up as the site of the Summer Olympics. Although recent economic growth has been disappointing, as most of the world was shaken by the massive recession after 2008, Brazil posted impressive economic growth, in particular with the help of a world commodities boom. The rediscovery of Brazil has already produced an impressive array of books that attempt to sum up the country for the general public, policy makers, and the business community. As the world's attention turns to the World Cup and the P6245.indb 221 P6245.indb 221

Routledge Handbook of Global Economic Histor, 2016

A sort of Brazilian exceptionalism could be suggested insofar as the country stands as the single colonial aggregate that was not fragmented after its Independence in 1822, as well as the only Lusophone nation and long standing constitutional monarchy in the Americas (1822-1889). Economic history in Brazil is no longer a central research field, as it used to be in the postwar period up to the 1970s, the years of Prado Jr and Furtado. New disciplinary divisions and academic specialization have certainly contributed to this. Besides, in most Brazilian Universities the discipline overlaps with, and is sometimes unduly absorbed by, the history of economic thought. There are, however, more substantial reasons. Drawing on Leroy-Beaulieu’s late nineteenth century distinction between ‘exploitation colonies’ and ‘settlement colonies’, Brazil’s historians have tended to eschew the costal factories or warehouses, ignoring significant stages of the European merchant capital expansion. In fact, it was the Atlantic Slave Trade and gold mining that turned Portuguese America's coastal factories and plantation enclaves into a single colony in the eighteenth century. Conceiving Brazil as a territorialized entity from the sixteenth century generates a tautological interpretation that overshadows Southern Atlantic history. The bipolarity between South American slave production sectors and African slave reproduction areas sustained the colonial spatial matrix in the South Atlantic until 1850, well beyond Brazil’s independence. Obliviousness to this is a dismaying tendency in a country where, according to the 2010 Census, more than the half of its inhabitants are of African descent.

2013

The presence of Haitian immigrants in the Brazilian Amazon after 2010 is a new development that challenges both researchers and governments in terms both of understanding the phenomenon and responding to their needs. Based on ethnographic material collected at the Tri-border region and in Manaus, the author raises key questions about the Haitian presence in the region and asks why Brazil came to be an emigration option for them. From this perspective, the paper asks; Is Brazil becoming a new Eldorado for skilled and unskilled immigrants? Some implications of this new phenomenon for Brazilian society are considered, with particular attention to the country’s immigration policy.

Springer eBooks, 2022

This chapter examines new migration flows to Brazil over the last 10 years and their relationship with changes in migration policies. The dynamics of migratory flows to Brazil between 2010 and 2020 have relocated the country in the global scenario of contemporary migration. The international economic crisis that began in 2007 in the United States, which also affected Europe and Japan, introduced greater complexity to the Latin American migratory phenomenon. It led to an increase in human mobility among south-to-south countries, and it placed Brazil as a destination country. Unlike migration flows in the late nineteenth century up to the 1930s, where most of the migrants were from the Global North (particularly Europe), in the last decade there has been an increase in migrants from the Global South: Haitians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Senegalese, Congolese, Angolans, Cubans, Bengalis, Syrians, and Pakistanis, among others. Historically, as Levy (1974) has pointed out, the period between 1820 and 1930 brought the first large scale free migratory currents to Brazil. During this period approximately 4.07 million migrants arrived in the country, most of them Europeans and Asians (Japanese). According to Levy, from the end of 1930 until 1980, Brazil