RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – “Rio is beautiful, Brazil is beautiful, but the violence is totally out of control,” laments Janette Ferreira Santos, a 43-year-old Brazilian migrant who works in a laundromat around Lisbon. “I left to provide my daughter with a better future.”
In 2018, Ferreira voted for President Jair Bolsonaro, believes in his promises of change (fighting crime was one of them), and says she would vote for him again. “The problem is that he took over a destroyed country,” she explains, “the PT (Worker’s Party) has been in power for 13 years and is still behind everything. So you can’t do much.”
She hesitates when she realizes that she is being interviewed, but in the end, she says: “The media is also the problem.” During Bolsonaro’s first year in office, since January 1st, 2019, migration of Brazilians to Portugal has skyrocketed: in 2018 there were 105,423 Brazilians living in the European country and 151,304 a year later, around 50 percent more, according to a report released by the Portuguese authorities last month.
In the preceding year, the increase had been of about 20,000 people (23 percent). The last time a similar increase occurred was in 2008 (61.2 percent). Portuguese citizenship applications have more than doubled.
Although the service sector in the main Portuguese cities is mostly taken by Brazilians, in the most recent migratory wave there are more educated youths and upper-middle-income families, according to law firms specializing in migration.
Last year there was also a 17 percent increase -after a 20 percent drop in the preceding year- in gold visas issued to citizens from Brazil. These residence permits are granted in exchange for an investment of between €250,000 (R$1.5 million) and €1 million, in different sectors, primarily real estate.
Ferreira left Brazil months after Bolsonaro’s victory; now she lives and works in Moscavide, a popular neighborhood that has become a stronghold of fellow compatriots. Nearby, separated by train tracks, is the neighborhood of Parque das Nações, a luxury area revamped after the 1998 World Expo and where the Oriente railway station is located.
“I’ll tell you something: the wealthy people of Brazil first voted for Bolsonaro and then moved here,” a waiter joked last summer with a group of tourists in a shopping mall.
Not all the wealthy voted for the current President, and not all moved to Portugal, but the flow of middle and upper-class professionals to the European country is perceptible. Yasmin Narcizo, a 30-year-old advertising editor, landed in Lisbon last year coming from Rio de Janeiro, tired of the country’s new political reality and insecurity. “I had already thought about emigrating to Portugal, but when Bolsonaro won, my husband and I said ‘enough’,” she says.
Narcizo has a podcast in which she offers advice on how to settle in Portugal. “We’ve received dozens of messages from people who want to leave Brazil,” she says, although rising unemployment due to the pandemic is forcing many Brazilians to return home.
Qualified employment
The government of socialist António Costa decided to encourage well-qualified immigration as a strategy to fight an existential threat: the aging of the Portuguese populace. Only Japan and Italy have a higher percentage of inhabitants over 65, according to data from the World Bank. In today’s Portugal, according to the Pordata consultancy, for each retired person there is only 1.6 social security contributor, whereasin the 1970s there were 12.7 contributors. The government facilitated the processing of employment visas for professionals and entrepreneurs. The new migrants from Brazil fit perfectly into this equation.
The growth of Brazilian migration to Portugal began in 2017, after a continuous three-year decline. Today, the 150,000-plus Brazilians represent a quarter of the total number of migrants in the European country (about 600,000), excluding those who already have Portuguese nationality due to their family roots, or those coming in with passports from other European countries, as in the case of the almost 7,500 Brazilians of Italian nationality living in Portugal.
“Brazilians don’t leave for political reasons. Undoubtedly, those who are against the President say it was his fault; and those who support him say that his administration has nothing to do with them leaving,” says Pedro Valido, an attorney who owns a company specializing in commercial law that advises clients interested in gold visas. “The truth is that they leave because they simply can’t bear the lack of security, they want to be able to walk down the street in peace,” Valido concludes.
In 2019 there was a record drop in the homicide rate in Brazil, one of the most violent countries in the world, but shootouts in broad daylight in cities like Rio de Janeiro are still common. “I say this with complete confidence: Bolsonaro’s victory was critical when I decided to leave,” says José Eduardo Chavans, a 27-year-old attorney who landed in Oporto last year to open an office branch that assists people who wish to migrate.
Just before the pandemic erupted, it was still a growing business, but the Brazilian government’s poor performance in fighting Covid-19 (the country having the second-highest number of cases and deaths, with close to two million people infected) led the world to literally close its doors to Brazilians, and left the destination of the migratory flow hanging.
Laissa Moura Ferreira, a 32-year-old designer, worked out the same figures: insecurity plus Bolsonaro equals voluntary exile in Portugal; she came in 2019 and plans to stay for many years, despite the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. “If all goes well, my parents will also come and live here.”
Source: El País
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