LatAm in Focus: What Brazil Can Teach the Americas About Immigration
LatAm in Focus: What Brazil Can Teach the Americas About Immigration
Migration experts Diego Chaves-González and João Jarochinski Silva explore Latin America’s reception of migrants, highlighting a novel strategy in Brazil.
Almost 8 million Venezuelans have left their home country over the last decade, an estimated 10 percent of Cubans have left their island since 2020, and at least one-tenth of Ecuadorians are living abroad following a surge of emigration in 2021.
“ I would say that we've entered, since maybe a few years ago, an era of human mobility without any precedent,” said Diego Chaves-González, senior manager of the Latin America and Caribbean Initiative at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC. On this episode of Latin America in Focus, Chaves-González provides a regional overview of efforts made by countries like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru to receive and quickly regularize exceptional numbers of new arrivals within their borders.
But there’s still more to be done to better connect migrants’ needs with government policy and private sector goals and advance long-term social and economic development objectives, he added. One country worth looking into? Latin America’s largest economy, Brazil. “Brazil has actually done something very successful. It has sustained a non-partisan or a bipartisan immigration strategy,” Chaves-González noted, “ and I think this is the type of message that we need to be sending the region.”
The U.S. president is resurrecting first-term tactics and promising a more aggressive reduction in immigration. AS/COA is monitoring the regional impacts.
So what is Brazil's immigration strategy? In conversation with AS/COA’s Luisa Leme, Professor João Jarochinski Silva of the Federal University of Roraima explains the on-the-ground realities of the much lauded Operation Welcome, an initiative established in 2018 to attend to the thousands of Venezuelan migrants crossing Brazil’s northwestern border in the Amazon.
Living and working in Boa Vista, a main city in the state of Roraima, Jarochinski witnessed first-hand a dramatic increase in people showing up at Brazil’s border with Venezuela, from about 10,000 in 2016 to 400,000 in 2017. “ We think about international migration in Brazil in the airports and the ports. We don't see the borders,” he said, “But here we have a neighboring country, and the numbers are higher than other flows in Brazil, and the vulnerability of these persons is very different.” In response, Brazilian government officials—from the city to the federal level—collaborated with local and international civil society groups to provide migrants with basic needs, legal documents, and employment in key sectors of the economy.
That’s not to say the picture is all rosy. Jarochinski Silva emphasized that differences in race, nationality, and gender affect how well migrants are able to settle in Brazil. Also, the relatively high cost of living and the low wages many migrants earn complicates how much money people are able to send to their families back home.
Looking ahead, the professor stressed the need to move past an emergency response to establishing “ a strong regional migration governance, something that should actually serve as an example for other regions.”
Thousands of Venezuelans are expected to emigrate in the wake of July’s election fraud. What legal migration pathways exist in the region?
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