Haitians leave Brazil amid economic crisis and fake news about open border in U.S.

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – At 33 years of age, Haitian Manite “Carol” Dorlean had always hated the cold. But, eight months pregnant with twins, she saw in the few meters river breadth the shortest distance she had ever been from realizing a dream.

“She crossed because she always thought that America is the land from which milk and honey flow. Everyone wants to get there,” said Gordia “Hector” Pierre, Carol’s ex-husband, who lives in the Dominican Republic, in an allusion to the biblical expression about the promised land for the Jews.

After spending two years in Brazil fruitlessly pursuing a better life, Carol stepped into the Rio Grande riverbed believing that in the US she would find what she was looking for. But she never reached the American bank alive. Her body was retrieved by the US border patrol on January 8th. She became the 18th person to drown and die from hypothermia there since October 2020, according to US authorities.

Carol’s trajectory from the time she left Brazil to her arrival in the US is illustrative of a move that more and more Haitians have been trying to make. Eleven years after the earthquake that devastated Haiti and prompted their arrival in Brazil (according to the Federal Police, an estimated 130,000 Haitians entered the country between 2010 and 2018), the group is now taking the opposite route.

Driven by discontent with the Brazilian economic crisis and fueled by a rumor that, under Biden’s administration, the US borders would be open to them – particularly to pregnant women or women with babies – Haitians are embarking on a long and dangerous journey to leave Brazil.

According to the US Customs and Border Protection data, the number of arrests of Haitians who crossed the border with Mexico without a visa in January 2021 – amid the covid-19 pandemic – more than tripled compared to the same month in 2020.

While in the first 31 days of last year 470 Haitians were spotted trying to enter the US through Mexico without a visa, there were 1,700 in the same period this year. And although the country in which they lived before their arrival in American soil is unknown, both Haitians and migration experts guarantee that part of this contingent left Brazil.

“Since the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, immigrants have been expecting a reform of the immigration law in the United States. This has driven the caravans of immigrants and it is possible that these migrants who live in Brazil are somehow also driven by these expectations of leaving Brazilian territory and hopefully access Central America to then reach the United States,” explains sociologist Letícia Mamed, a professor at the Federal University of Acre who specializes in migration.

Last Monday, March 8th, a group of 100 migrants, most of them Haitian, decided to leave the bridge where they had been camped for almost a month, at the border between Peru and Brazil, in Assis Brasil, Acre. Among the group, there were 15 to 20 children and 5 pregnant women, one of them in her 8th month of pregnancy. In the municipality of only 7,500 inhabitants, at least 300 more recently arrived Haitians were trying to find refuge in precarious and improvised shelters.

All of them intended to leave Brazil and go through Peru. To social agents, they admitted that Peruvian territory is not their final destination: most would try to reach the US. In the case of Haitians and other migrants who leave Brazil by land route, the journey begins in Acre and goes through Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala, before reaching Mexico.

But a little over a month ago, the Peruvian government closed its land border because of the Covid-19 pandemic and interrupted the flow, which led to tension and an impasse in the area. In attempts to force their way through, Haitians and some Africans were repressed with stun bombs and batons. In one of these situations, recorded by the press in the area, a woman lifted up her shirt to show her pregnant belly and shouted “I’m pregnant,” while facing the Peruvian security agents.

With no forecast by the Peruvian government for the reopening of the bridge, the Brazilian government has even asked the courts for the area’s forced repossession. Federal public defender João Chaves, a specialist in immigration, has spent the last few weeks in the area trying to prevent further violence. In photos taken by the defender, the precariousness of Haitians’ shelters on the bridge can be clearly seen: some sheltered under tents built from tree branches and tarps or garbage bags. According to Chaves, the bridge was occupied out of desperation.

“It is a borderline situation of despondency, of hopelessness. The Haitian, African, Cuban and many other countries’ communities depend on mobility, they no longer have any expectation of a comfortable life in Brazil, of a safe life, because of the recession, the economic crisis, the pandemic, they desperately seek other countries and can’t get there,” says Chaves.

Life deteriorating in Brazil

When the first Haitians came to Brazil, the country’s GDP was growing at 7.5% and the dollar exchange rate stood at R$1.66. In contrast, in 2020, the Brazilian economy registered a 4.1% drop and it takes R$5.20 to buy a dollar. The data are not abstract in the lives of those who need not only to support themselves but also to make large remittances abroad to help support friends and relatives who have been left behind in their homeland. In 2020, remittances from Haitian emigrants abroad accounted for 37% of Haiti’s GDP, according to World Bank data.

The statistics illustrate why Carol decided to come to Brazil – and also what led her to leave it in 2020. She had previously lived in the Dominican Republic and Chile, both of which she left in search of higher incomes to support her three children and widowed mother.

Carol came to Brazil in 2017 and according to her ex-husband had several jobs. One of her longest jobs in the country, in 2019, was as cleaning attendant in a restaurant in Curitiba. There, she worked about 10 hours a day in exchange for R$1,000 a month. But just with the rent of a room and urban transportation, she spent R$800. The income was too low to accomplish her original plans.

“Once, she was able to advance her thirteenth month’s salary, because she was really in need, and she got US$100. Sending US$100 to her children was a victory for her,” says Shirley Batista, a sous chef in the same restaurant where Carol worked. Batista says that the Haitian woman suffered from basic needs such as lacking a blanket to sleep in the cold Curitiba winter nights.

“She worked as a cleaner, cleaning the bar, cleaning the lounge. When she was done, she would go to the kitchen and wash all the dishes. She was highly exploited. It was something that I got very upset about in that place. One day she made a comment that really hurt me. She looked at me and said: ‘I am black, right, so I am a slave’,” says Batista, who preferred not to disclose the name of the restaurant, from which she says she quit, among other reasons, because she disagreed with Carol’s employment situation.

The uneasiness with both the financial issue and the racial prejudice is frequent in the migrants’ reports.

At the age of 35, a Haitian known in the community as Chamara, who refused to give his name, says he is determined to leave for the US. He wants to reach Florida this year, where his mother and his 9-year-old son now live. For almost 8 years in Brazil, he has been working as an electrician in Rio Claro, in the interior of São Paulo, and says that although he works maximum overtime every month, his salary rarely exceeds R$2,000.

“As I am a father and I play my father’s role, and my mother knows what the situation is like here, she accepts that I send her US$100, US$200. She accepts it because she knows that in Brazil there is no money. But if I depended on what I am earning to take care of my son, there I would never be able to take care of him,” he laments.

With degrees in law and journalism, he resents the fact that he has never been able to get better paying jobs in his field of training. He has been trying to get Brazilian citizenship to make it easier to leave Brazil: that way he would take a direct flight to Mexico and try to cross the border. Chamara refused to discuss the option of going through Acre. According to him, all the other Haitians in Brazil came to the same conclusion about not having a future in the country.

“Economically, the Haitians won’t fit into Brazil’s system, with this salary, with all the prejudice they have, Brazil is not ready to welcome foreigners, I won’t even say Haitians, but foreigners. Brazil is not even ready for Brazilians,” says Chamara.

Despite the harsh criticism of the country, Chamara is still in a better condition than a significant part of his compatriots. During the pandemic, many lost their income. Sectors such as building construction or services, which usually employ Haitian labor, were severely affected.

According to Akon Patrick Dieudonné, leader of the Social Union of Haitian Immigrants, since some are employed informally, without a signed contract, they are cheaper workers to lay off for employers. And for this reason, once they lose their jobs, they have no access to insurance or severance pay.

Amid the pandemic, a detail has further complicated the situation of foreigners in Brazil: there is a waiting line of over 20,000 applications for renewal and regulation of the National Migratory Registration Card, a kind of identity document for foreigners, whose issuance is the responsibility of the Federal Police.

There is no foreseeable solution to the problem. Without this document, they are illegal in the country and can’t apply for benefits such as the family grant or the now extinct emergency aid.

“This moment we are experiencing is a bottomless pit. Destitution is now very visible. You go to Missão Paz, for example, and you see Haitians selling corn, tomatoes, sacks of rice (to survive),” says Patrick, in reference to the immigrant shelter run by the Catholic Church in downtown São Paulo.

The American dream

The time of deep disenchantment with Brazil coincides with the end of Donald Trump’s administration and the coming to power of Democrat Joe Biden. Biden was elected vowing to end what he called Trump’s “cruel and inhumane” immigration policy and to re-accept refugees and migrants to American territory. He also pledged to build along with the US Congress a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country today.

All this reached Haitian community’s attention as a guaranteed asylum if they reach American territory, a historical dream of the country’s migrants. The US today is home to the largest Haitian community outside of Haiti, with an estimated 700,000 people, according to 2018 data from the Migration Policy Institute.

Pierre, Carol’s ex-husband, says that this kind of discourse encouraged not only his ex-partner, but many in the community. “Now there is Biden in the US, they say Biden is soft. But Biden hasn’t talked to them, I don’t know what language Biden and the Haitians spoke, but they say that Biden is the father of migrants, that he will let them cross, and they kill themselves, they leave good jobs to head to the US,” says Pierre, unable to conceal his outrage with the spread of fake news in the migratory network.

Not only Haitians are ready to try to re-enter the US. In January 2021, the US recorded the detention of over 78,000 people trying to illegally cross the Mexican border, the highest figure for the period in over a decade.

According to a report in the New York Times, in the last two weeks, the number of unaccompanied minors in the border region has tripled, exceeding more than 3,000.

According to Laura Lopes, coordinator of migrant services at the Adus Institute, which works in São Paulo on the social integration of refugees and victims of forced migration, the cause for migration of Haitians – and other nationalities – is now heavily based on fake information and unfounded hopes.

“There are several and varied rumors they allege to make the crossing. They said that now with the new president it is easier to get in. The border is not closed. Something else they told me, and I think that explains why so many women are going, is that they said that if you are pregnant, once you reach the Mexican border, you will be allowed in because you are pregnant. I even have an acquaintance who is Haitian and she became pregnant, took the route and when she got there, she reported being pregnant and the child was eventually born in the United States,” says Lopes.

The Public Defender’s Office has been issuing reports in an attempt to refute these fake news and stem the flow, or at least offer more reliable data for an informed decision about leaving Brazil. In a recent interview, the US State Department spokesperson Kristina Rosales said that “the United States is working on a policy to restore the migration process, which will be organized and fair, that it won’t be a process where everybody gets to the border and whoever wins the race, will get in.”

At the US border, unable to cope with the migration wave, the Biden administration has been criticized for resorting to an arrangement created by his predecessor, Trump, during the pandemic, to summarily expel migrants.

The US border protection service confirmed that Haitians continue to be deported back to Haiti despite the political and social chaos in the country. Since early this year, the nation has been the stage of violent protests calling for the removal from power of the current president, Jovenel Moïse. Protesters claim that his mandate is already over. The president, on the other hand, claims to be the victim of a coup d’état and declares that he will remain in power until 2022.

In hindsight, Pierre wishes that Carol had simply abandoned the idea of going to the US and returned to the Dominican Republic to help him raise the couple’s children.

According to him, when he learned of her death “it was as if they had turned out the light of the world.” Two months after their loss, the family is still struggling with the process of releasing her body for burial. He says he shares her story as a means of raising awareness among his compatriots about the risks of the endeavor. “Manite told me how people were dropping dead from starvation, from exhaustion. She left people unconscious along the way, but she had to keep going because if she stayed, she would die too. Out of 100 people who leave Brazil, half or 40% die. And when they pass, they are deported. There are many who go, but few who make it,” he summarizes.

Source: BBC Brasil