Leaving America for better opportunities in Brazil

Carnival.  Why on earth would people leave the United States to live in Brazil?



Brazilians are leaving America to make their fortune in Brazil

• Brazilians are returning to Brazil for better opportunities than in America
• Brazil unemployment is at historic lows, incomes are rising rapidly
• Brazilian executives earn more money in Sao Paulo, Brazil's economic capital, than in any other city in the world. New York came in second.

In America, Comrade Obama and his Socialist allies do not have a clue how to get the nation out of the Great Depression they created.  Perhaps they could learn a few things from our friends in Brazil, India and China on how capitalism works. 

Now we are seeing immigrants who came to the United States leaving to back to their home nations where there is better opportunity than in America.  See our article on Mexicans returning to Mexico.  The Federalist - 300,000 illegal aliens left California, many to Mexico   

Since the economic crisis struck in the U.S. three years ago, the Brazilian economy has continued to surge, and the currency, the real, has appreciated dramatically against the dollar. The unemployment rate here is at a historic low, and incomes, especially of the lower and middle classes, are rising rapidly. In many sectors, Brazilian workers earn more than their U.S. counterparts.

"It's hard to get specific numbers," said Eduardo Gradilone Neto, undersecretary-general for Brazilian Communities Abroad at the Foreign Ministry. "But we're seeing that a significant part of what we call the Brazilian diaspora is coming home, because there are comparatively so much more opportunities here than there were five or 10 years ago."

He said Brazilians began emigrating in large numbers in the 1990s, when opportunities in Europe and the United States looked attractive compared with the economic problems in their homeland. At one point, he said, 3 million Brazilians were living abroad, many of them the young people who are the country's future. "That was the trend until 2008, when we saw the crisis in the developed countries," reports the Los Angeles Times.

Brazilian Carnival star Angela Bismarchi

About a third of the Brazilians living in Japan, for which there are official numbers because of a special visa agreement, have returned since 2008, Gradilone said.

"We wouldn't be surprised to see that a similar ratio of the community living in the U.S. had returned," he said. "And in the communities that we historically expected to see emigration, now instead of going to the U.S. or Europe, they tend to go to other Brazilian cities."

Strict banking regulations meant that Brazil was relatively unscathed by the 2008 global banking meltdown crisis.

A 2010 report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates that about 200,000 undocumented Brazilians live in the United States, and many more are residents with visas or permanent citizenship. The Brazilian government puts the number of Brazilians in the U.S. at about 1 million.

Making it in Brazil

Two years ago, Victor Bahia was scraping by on tips from delivering pizzas to UC Berkeley students, living in rough neighborhoods and dodging immigration authorities. These days, he runs his two businesses between frequent trips to the beach here in his hometown and barbecues with his family at a new house in a quiet suburb.

But he didn't return because he had realized the dream of many immigrants: earning enough money in the United States to start a new life at home. He gave up on California because he became convinced that booming Brazil offered much more opportunity than the crisis-ridden U.S.

"I had nightmares about the drop in the value of the dollar. I dreamt that it dropped to $1 for one real and woke up screaming," said Flavia, who just returned to Salvador da Bahia with her husband, Toni. He has U.S. citizenship, but she wasn't able to acquire a green card because, she said, immigration authorities didn't believe their marriage was legitimate.

Toni got his start working illegally in California as a driver after moving from Goias, in the rural interior of Brazil, then got his papers after his first marriage, to a U.S. citizen. He and Flavia have asked that their full names not be used, because a year after applying for Flavia's green card, their case is still technically open.

"So we came back." she said. "But then I saw that my cousins who stayed here, went to school and got jobs have often earned even more than those of us who went abroad and struggled.

"I left my country when I was 18," she said, "and I went 10 years without seeing my family, and I think, was it worth it?"

She worked as a nanny in San Francisco, and says she will go back to school in Brazil, because Toni quickly found work as a contractor.

It's not just low-income workers who have been drawn home by the economy. Companies and business schools say they are luring back Brazilians who might have previously planned on working in the U.S. For one thing, the money is better.

The Economist magazine found this year that executives earn more money in Sao Paulo, Brazil's economic capital, than in any other city in the world. New York came in second.

"We are seeing all kinds of Brazilians return," said Rodrigo Zeidan, professor of international economics at the Fundacao Dom Cabral, one of Brazil's top business schools. "And doing so makes perfect economic sense. Brazil has found its own internal growth engine, and incomes are rising, especially in the middle and lower-middle classes.

"I myself have recently come home from abroad, and we in Brazil are living through something that unfortunately a lot of the rich countries like the U.S. don't have at the moment. Young people tend to take it for granted that with a little hard work they can do something bigger and better than what their parents are doing."

Rio de Janeiro

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