Immigration to Brazil

European and Levantine countries with significant emigration to Brazil, 1820 to 1980.
Monument to the immigrant in Caxias do Sul reading: "The Brazilian nation to the immigrant" (Portuguese: "A nação brasileira ao imigrante")
Portuguese descendants in Santos.
Italian descendants in São Paulo.
Italian regional immigration to Brazil, which has the most people of Italian origin outside Italy. Unlike other countries with Italian immigrants, Brazil prioritized Northern Italy which it considered more developed.

Immigration to Brazil is the movement to Brazil of foreign peoples to reside permanently. It should not be confused with the forcible bringing of people from Africa as slaves. Latin Europe accounted for four-fifths of the arrivals (1.8 million Portuguese, 1.5 million Italians, and 700,000 Spaniards). This engendered a strikingly multicultural society. Yet over a few generations, Brazil absorbed these new populations in a manner that resembles the experience of the rest of the New World.[1]

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Throughout its history, Brazil has always been a recipient of settlers, but this began to gain importance in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century when the country received massive immigration from Europe, the Middle East, and Japan, which left lasting marks on demography, culture, language and the economy of Brazil.

In general, it is considered that people who entered Brazil up to 1822, the year of independence, were wholly colonizers. Since then, some of those who entered the independent nation were immigrants, mainly Portuguese, Italians and Spaniards, but also Germans, Japanese, Poles, Lebanese, Syrians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and many others.[2][3]

Before 1871, the number of immigrants rarely exceeded two or three thousand people a year. Immigration increased pressure from the first end of the international slave trade to Brazil, after the expansion of the economy, especially in the period of large coffee plantations in the state of São Paulo.

Immigration has been a very important demographic factor in the composition, structure and history of human population in Brazil, with all its attending factors and consequences in culture, economy, education, racial issues. Brazil has received one of the largest numbers of immigrants in the Western Hemisphere, along with the United States, Argentina and Canada.[4]

Counting from 1872 (year of the first census) by the year 2000, Brazil received about 6 million immigrants.

  1. ^ Moya, Jose (2020). "Immigration and the Historical Formation of Brazil". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.894. ISBN 978-0-19-936643-9. Archived from the original on 18 December 2021. Retrieved 24 December 2021.
  2. ^ Levy, Maria Stella Ferreira (1 June 1974). "O papel da migração internacional na evolução da população brasileira (1872 a 1972)". Revista de Saúde Pública (in Portuguese). 8 (supl): 49–90. doi:10.1590/S0034-89101974000500003. ISSN 1518-8787. Archived from the original on 13 June 2016. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
  3. ^ "IBGE | Biblioteca | Detalhes | Brasil : 500 anos de povoamento / IBGE, Centro de Documentação e Disseminação de Informações. -". biblioteca.ibge.gov.br. Archived from the original on 10 October 2022. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
  4. ^ "BBC Brasil – Os migrantes de hoje". Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 18 January 2009.