Migration

Folklore asserts that Brazilians never leave their homeland and that the very idea of emigration disturbs them. Brazilian society is focused around kinship, neighbourhood, and community, and few people are willing to break away from these networks. Moreover, the sheer size and physical beauty of this great tropical land tends to call people back. Yet Brazilians have long had good reason to emigrate. Brazil was the world’s most extensive slave-owning state, and its economy was built on the repression of any attempt by the working class to defend its political and economic rights. The gap between rich and poor with regard to income and property has been among the greatest in the world, even in the industrial south. The poor have fought back through mob action or robbery and assault.

Despite these factors, there are several reasons why emigration was not a popular option. First, the enormous size of the country allowed internal migration to continue for centuries. This activity has included continual movement by farming people to frontiers of new settlement and has extended the land devoted to agriculture, despite the failure of the military government to resettle large numbers of peasants in the Amazon basin. More important has been the ongoing shift from the rural areas into the cities. The industrialization of São Paulo state created enormous opportunities for migration. In this century, millions of people have moved from the blighted northeast into the southeast.

A second factor has been the class structure and discrepancies in income, which have meant that those who could afford to leave the country did not want to do so and those who might have wished to emigrate could not. The poorest and most oppressed, especially in the rural areas of the northeast and the favelas (shanty towns) of the cities, have had the greatest motivation to leave but could not afford travel fares and emigration papers. And because they were poor, uneducated, and often dark-skinned, they would not have been welcome in most of the world’s traditional host countries. Thirdly, the social structure of Brazil – much less individualistic than that of North America – has made it more difficult for people to break out of kinship networks and attempt to survive on their own.

Brazil and Canada, moreover, have had few historic links. Canada did not open an embassy in Brazil until 1942. Its lack of interest in Latin America was demonstrated by its reluctance to join the Organization of American States until recently. Immigration from Brazil has thus been on a small scale. For the Portuguese elite, as well as for most later European immigrants, Brazil was a land of economic opportunity where wealth was always possible. Gambling on the lottery or the numbers game became part of Brazilian character. A belief that things would get better, at least for one’s children, was always strong. To understand the complex, multifaceted nature of immigration from Brazil to Canada it is first necessary to examine the long-established economic ties between the two countries.

At first glance, strong economic links between Brazil and Canada would seem unlikely. Both countries are geographically vast, with considerable natural resources in minerals, water, farm production, and lumber, and both have extensive industrial plants. One might expect economic rivalry rather than cooperation. Yet, for a half a century, Brazil was one of the principal targets of Canadian investment capital. In 1951 Canada was the second-largest investor in Brazil, with 30 percent of foreign holdings in the country, greater than the United Kingdom’s 12 percent and just below the 44 percent investment by the United States. By 1986, however, Canadian investment had dropped to 5 percent.

Much of Canada’s importance in the economy of Brazil resulted from a single company, the Brazilian Traction Light and Power Company, known simply as “the Light.” This company (now Brascan) came into existence in 1899 when a group of Canadian investors and engineers, including Zebulon A. Lash and his son Miller Lash, Sir William Mackenzie, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, and E.R. Wood, and an American, Fred Stark Pearson, who were involved in building railways and hydroelectric plants in Canada, were attracted to the possibility of similar operations in Brazil. Their investment was made at a strategic moment in the country’s history. The expansion of the coffee industry was reaching a peak. A massive growth of secondary industries had developed, protected by high Brazilian tariffs. The main cities of the southeast, especially Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, were just beginning the boom that was to make them two of the greatest urban centres in the Americas.

For half a century, Brazilian Traction dominated the building of the urban infrastructure of southern Brazil, becoming the largest private company in Latin America. It supplied 60 percent of the power produced in Brazil and approximately 75 percent of the nation’s telephones. Its concessions extended to 885,780 square kilometres, and it became Brazil’s largest private employer, with nearly 50,000 people on its payroll. During most of its history, the company recruited its engineers and administrators from the “North.” Thus for almost a century there has been a small segment of Toronto’s elite profoundly involved in Brazil. A number of the professionals sent to the country by Brascan married there and eventually brought their Brazilian wives and children to Toronto. The reverse was not true. Few Brazilians came to work in the company’s Canadian offices, although many thousands were employed in Brazil.

Economic ties between Canada and Brazil have continued on a considerable scale. Canadian companies such as Brascan, Alcan Aluminum, and Massey-Ferguson have invested billions of dollars in Brazil since World War II. The country serves as the third most important target for Canadian investment after the United States and Britain. The importance of Brazilian trade was highlighted by visits to that country by prime ministers Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s and Jean Chrétien in the following decade. But these economic links did not result in equally large-scale social and cultural links. Brazilian immigration to Canada remained extremely limited. Countries such as Guyana or Chile, with much weaker investment and trade relations with Canada, had many times the number of immigrants. Brazil’s economy had grown fairly steadily since 1930, but political development was much more erratic. The result was increasing violence on the part of those excluded from the new economic prosperity. The problem became critical in the mid-1980s, when the economy stalled and there was no serious attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Middle-class Brazilians, especially young people, were trapped between declining economic prospects and increasing urban violence, and they began seeking ways to escape. The two most common reasons given in interviews for leaving Brazil and moving to Canada were the difficulty of making a living and urban violence.

In Canada, traditional immigration policy had explicitly favoured northern Europeans, especially the British, and the only immigration allowed from Brazil consisted almost entirely of people of known European origin. In the existing records, no Afro-Brazilians are seen to have entered the country and even Portuguese-Brazilians are in the minority. But the Canadian Immigration Act of 1967 established a point system for admission and gave greater opportunity for people from the less-developed countries to immigrate to Canada, bringing a “new wave” of incomers from all over the world. Still, Brazilian immigration was strikingly small until 1986. With one of the world’s largest populations, the country has rarely accounted for more than three-tenths of 1 percent of the total number of immigrants to Canada (0.38 percent in 1991, the year of the largest migration). Even among South American nations, Brazil, with almost half the total population of the continent, has averaged less than 5 percent of immigration, and only since 1989 has this figure gone above 8 percent. The low rate of immigration reflects several factors: the general disinterest of Brazilians in emigration; a lack of knowledge about Canada as a target country for those able to migrate; the absence in Canada of a large Brazilian community that would encourage the migration of family members; and the lack of perception in Canada of Brazil as a country in crisis and a legitimate source of refugees.

Between 1956 and 1991, some 14,976 Brazilians entered Canada as landed immigrants. From 1968 to 1976 immigration averaged about 520 a year; it subsequently dropped to about 300 a year. After 1985 the number increased annually, from 162 in that year to 882 in 1991 and to nearly 1,300 in 1994. The pattern of immigration also changed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Brazilians tended to migrate because of family or other social links. Brazil had served as a country of “through” immigration in which European war refugees stayed until they could be reunited with their families elsewhere. Thus nearly 40 percent of early immigrants from Brazil were not natives of that country. Many transnational families, with kin in several countries of Latin America as well as in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, settled in Toronto. More recently, movement has been tied to economic opportunity, and the proportion of native-born Brazilian immigrants by the mid 1990s had reached 99 percent of the total.

Strong economic links between Brazil and Canada and a limited and elitist immigration pattern shaped the Brazilian community in Toronto until 1980. A small, wealthy group comprised of relatives of the business elite formed the core of this community, though the growing commercial and cultural links between the two countries after 1967 brought more Brazilians to Toronto to work in new transnational firms. In addition, a few Brazilians entered the country as independent immigrants seeking to earn hard cash to take back to Brazil, and some of these found regular employment and stayed. Until 1985, however, Canadian restrictions and the point system often meant that only a small number of Brazilians with relatively good education qualified as independent immigrants, thus favouring the offspring of European families in Brazil.

The years 1981–84 in Brazil were a time of severe recession that resulted from policies intended to address the external payments crisis. Capital began to flow out of Brazil to Miami and other cities in North America. The failure of President Sarney’s Cruzado Plan, according to some Brazilian immigrants, was a final psychological blow. They began to leave en masse. Although there had been Brazilian immigration to Canada on a small scale for decades, it was the loss of hope in a better future after 1986 that created a crisis for many Brazilians and led to a large-scale exodus from the country. Thousands of Brazilians, mostly males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five but including entire families, poured into other countries by means of loopholes in immigration laws or ostensibly as tourists. One estimate places their total number at 630,000 between 1986 and 1991, with 7,000 of them coming to Canada. Liberal Canadian rules for refugees led many Brazilians to claim this status. Although inspired by the success of people from other Latin American countries such as Chile and Nicaragua, Brazilians have had limited success, since the Canadian government has never seen their homeland as a country in political crisis.

The exact number of Brazilians who entered Canada in the years from 1986 to 1988 will never be known. Estimates have ranged from 3,500 to 15,000 according to some social workers. Since they were officially tourists, those who remained did so illegally, although many claimed refugee status on entry or later. This wave of unofficial migration, on top of growing official immigration, resulted in not one Brazilian community but several. Indeed, the diverse pattern of migration re-created in miniature the Brazilian class and social structure in Canada, especially in Toronto. The new immigrants were an anomaly from the standpoint of Brazilian history. For the most part, they were working-class people who had found the resources to leave their country, often despite a lack of higher education or even a knowledge of English. Many of them arrived penniless at the Toronto airport expecting jobs that they had been promised by operatives in Brazil. The service agencies of Toronto, particularly those of the Portuguese community, were overwhelmed.

The majority of new immigrants came from the state of Minas Gerais, a transitional region between the industrial southeast and the agrarian north. In part, the movement resulted from the enterprise of a few travel agencies in the cities of Governador Valadares and Ipatinga who promoted emigration to the United States and Canada by advertising and even lending money for transportation. Canada especially was portrayed as a country where health care and social services were supplied free and where welfare and unemployment insurance payments, let alone the minimum wage, were more than most middle-class Brazilians earned. Many people borrowed money to emigrate to “El Dorado do Norte.” Unscrupulous agents coached some of them about Canadian refugee laws and even supplied fraudulent travel documents.