Brazil: Migration Flows Reversed

Financial Times
Published: November 3, 2011

Brazilians are used to seeing their compatriots head abroad to try their luck in Europe or North America. Until recently, they weren’t so used to seeing foreigners coming the other way.

But now that the rich countries are embroiled in crisis as Brazil continues to grow, the direction of migratory flows is changing. For the first time in twenty years, there are more foreigners living in Brazil than there are Brazilians living abroad.

As of June, there were 1.47m legal immigrants living in Brazil, according to the justice ministry. If you add another 600,000 – the best guess for the number of undocumented immigrants in the country – you get more than 2m, which is the number of Brazilians the government believes now live abroad, many having returned over the past five years.

The slightly imprecise mathematics was first done by Rio-based newspaper O Globo, which proudly proclaimed over the weekend that Brazil was “back to being a country of immigrants, reclaiming a characteristic from its history that had seemed lost.” The ministry confirmed to beyondbrics that the numbers do add up.

The wave of foreign immigrants can be roughly divided into two categories: professionals taking advantage of low unemployment and high wages who arrive with a sponsored visa; and those who arrive without a visa, often from neighbouring countries, who can usually count on being naturalised sooner or later. No country dominates the inflows, but the main exporting countries are Portugal, Bolivia, China and Paraguay, in that order. After the Portuguese, which make up 23 per cent of legal immigrants, the numbers are spread quite thin. Second-place Bolivians account for only 3.5 per cent.

“I came basically looking for professional development,” says Hugo López Guanter, a 31-year old architect from Barcelona who has been working in São Paulo for a little over a year. “I found it a bit hard to progress [in Europe]”. In many cases, the pay is better here, though the cost of living is unexpectedly high, he says.

The Brazilian economy is set to grow less quickly this year but the risks on the horizon have yet to change the way things feel for most families. Unemployment remains at record lows. And the economy would have to grow by much less than the expected 3 to 3.5 per cent expected this year to make it an unattractive proposition for enterprising western Europeans.

Portugal, apart from the benefits of a shared language, gets special treatment for immigration to Brazil. And irregular immigrants, especially those from South American countries, can count on relatively open arms – a point the previous justice minister, Luiz Paulo Barreto, used to love to make when criticising the treatment of Brazilian immigrants abroad.

“If I were to give advice to people living back in Lima looking to emigrate, I’d definitely recommend moving to Brazil rather than the US,” says Luis Barrera Muñoz, a Peruvian working at a hotel in Rio de Janeiro who used to live in southern Florida. “I would have never said that ten years ago, but now I’m thinking of opening my [construction] business, which failed in the US, down here.”