Immigration in Brazil (immigration occurs when people leave one country to settle permanently in another) has been a very important demographic factor in the composition, structure and history of human population in Brazil, and all its attending factors and consequences, such as culture, economy, education, racial issues, etc.

Contents

1 Brief history 2 Statistics 3 Current trends 4 Consequences 5 Related topics 6 External links

Brief history

When Brazil was discovered as a new land in the New World by the Portuguese in 1500, its native population was composed by several million Amerindians living there for the last 15,000 to 20,000 years. During several decades afterwards, the country remained sparsely inhabited by Europeans, mainly Portuguese, Spaniard, Dutch and French explorers and sailors who jumped ship to live among the Indians. The Portuguese crown started to send exiles permanently to Brazil as a punishment to crimes committed in Portugal (who were called the degredados), and these constituted the first forced immigrants to the new land. Economical development, however, and settlement of colonies, mainly along the coast and main rivers, such as the Amazon river system, the São Francisco river, the Paraná river and its tributaries such as the Tietê river in São Paulo followed rapidly in the second half of the 16th century and in the two suceeding centuries. The overwhelming majority of immigrants were Portuguese.

Another important instance of forced migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. Millions of natives from Africa were hunted down, captured and transported to slavery in Brazil, for two centuries and half, adding to the demographic and racial composition of the country.

This immigration profile of Brazil really started to change in the second half of the 19th century during the Empire era. Dom Pedro II, the ruling Brazilian monarch, was a learned and cosmopolitan man, who abhorred slavery (it was abolished by a imperial decree in 1888) and who thought that Brazil would only achieve progress by bringing in more European immigrants. He thus strongly encouraged immigration from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Middle East, Russia and other regions and countries which were exporting lots of their own people to the New World from 1860 on, due to the accumulation of political and economical crises in Europe. At the same time, Brazil's economy, which was eminently agrarian (coffee, cotton, tobacco, rubber and sugar cane being the main crops) at the time, needed able laborers once slavery of black people was stopped.

Since agriculture, industry and services sectors were developing quickly and strongly in the South and Southeast, these provinces (Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) received the brunt of European immigration. Italians and Germans went mostly to the South; while Italians, Middle Easterners, Portuguese and Spaniards went to the Southeast. In a later wave, towards the beginning of the 20th century, Japan became also an important source of immigrants, who, in their majority, established themselves in São Paulo and Paraná.

Statistics

Immigration to Brazil, by nationality, decenal periods from 1884-1893, 1924-1933 and 1945-1949 Source: Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE)
	Decade
Nationality	1884-1893	1894-1903	1904-1913	1914-1923	1924-1933	1945-1949	1950-1954	1955-1959
Germans	22,778	6,698	33,859	29,339	61,723	5,188	12,204	4,633
Spaniards	113,116	102,142	224,672	94,779	52,405	4,092	53,357	38,819
Italians	510,533	537,784	196,521	86,320	70,177	15,312	59,785	31,263
Japanese	-	-	11,868	20,398	110,191	12	5,447	28,819
Portuguese	170,621	155,542	384,672	201,252	233,650	26,268	123,082	96,811
Middle Easterners	96	7,124	45,803	20,400	20,400	N/A	N/A	N/A
Other	66,524	42,820	109,222	51,493	164,586	29,552	84,851	47,599
Total	883,668	852,110	1,006,617	503,981	717,223	80,424	338,726	247,944

Brazil's receiving structure, legislation and settlement policies for immigrants were much less organized than in Canada and the United States at the time. Nevertheless, an Immigrant's Hostel (Hospedaria dos Imigrantes) was built in 1886 in São Paulo, and quick admittance and recording routines for the hordes of immigrants arriving by ship at the seaports of Vitória, Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Paranaguá, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre were implanted. The São Paulo site alone processed more thar 2,5 million immigrants in its almost 100 years of continuous operation. People of more than 70 different nationalities were recorded.

Current trends

After the First World War, during and after the Second World War, three other waves of immigrants came to Brazil from Europe and Asia, on the wake of great disturbances caused by the wars, and Jewish immigrants also became important. In the second half of the 20th century, immigration to Brazil was greatly reduced, in part because checks on entrance of foreigners became more rigid, but also because immigration pressures decreased as wealth and political and economical stability increased in those countries which contributed mostly. Recent immigration was mainly constituted by Chinese and Koreans and, in a much smaller degree, by Argentines and other Latin America immigrants willing to escape from political oppression and economical suffering.

Consequences

As it happened with several other countries in the Americas, such as the United States, which encouraged the immigration from many other countries, Brazil quickly became a melting pot of races and nationalities, probably the second largest in the world after the USA, but being peculiar in the sense of having rhe highest degree of intermarriage in the world. People of European origin found there a strong social and cultural tolerance toward inter-racial marriage , with large numbers of mulattos (white/black mestizos), mestees (Indian/white and Indian/black mestizos) and melungeons (three-way hybrids of Europeans, African and Indians). Correspondingly, this free disposition of Brazilians toward inter-racial ant inter-ethnic reproduction (not always accompanied by an entire lack of racism, but notably free of it) reflected in low psychological and social barriers to intermarriage between Europeans, Middle Easterners and Asians of several origins, as well as between people of different religions.

Another consequence of strong immigration from North and South Europeans and Asiatics was the development of a work ethics and education-based personal progress which were lacking in the Brazilian ethos so far, as well as the importation of much needed skills acquired by these people in their countries of origin. As a result, distribution of wealth, economic resources and education has been largely apportioned to the states in the South and Southeast. Some cities, like Campinas, have more than 60% of their family surnames of Italian origin and Brazil is, with the USA, the country with the largest number of Italian descendants (more than 25 million), as well as Japanese, German and Jewish. Names of cities in the South, such as Joinville, Blumenau, etc., reflected its majority of German and Italian immigrants, who, until the Second World War preserved their language, education and customs in almost intact form. Dictator Getulio Vargas, however, suppressed this during the war, out of fear of Axis spies and sabotage.

The resulting infusion of strength, intelligence and beauty provided by immigration and hybridization to Brazilian biotypes can be appreciated by observing international personalities such as soccer players Ronaldinho and Pelé (both Portuguese mulattos), tennis player Gustavo Kuerten and basketball ace Oscar Schmidt (of German origin), supermodels Daniela Cicarelli and Isabeli Fontana (of Italian origin), Gisele Bündchen, Mariana Weickert , Ana Cláudia Michaels and Anna Hickmann (of German origin), autoracers Ayrton Senna, Emerson Fittipaldi and Rubens Barrichello (of Italian origin), painters Lasar Segall (Russian Jew) and Candido Portinari (Italian), genius architect Oscar Niemeyer, politicians Jaime Lerner (German) and Juscelino Kubitschek (Czech), writer Clarice Lispector (Ukrainian Jew), physicians Adib Jatene (Lebanese) and Ivo Pitanguy (French); inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont (French), scientists César Lattes (Italian), Warwick Estevam Kerr (Scottish), and Eduardo Krieger (German), and so on.

Related topics

• Culture of Brazil
• Demographics of Brazil
• History of Brazil
• List of Brazilians

External links

• Hospedaria dos Imigrantes. São Paulo (in Portuguese).