Change of wind: the migration from Brazil to Portugal in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century

Author(s)

Aline Lima Santos

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2010-12-14

Examining board members

Rosa Ester Rossini; Andre Roberto Martin; Maria Beatriz Pinto de Sousa Amorim Rocha Trindade

• Advisor: Rosa Ester Rossini

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, the emigration has become a significant phenomenon in the brazilian population dynamics. The flow of brazilian population to Portugal emerges, at this moment, as something new, supplying with primary information an ancient relation. The inversion of the traditional flow constitutes itself a new pattern, but in opposite direction from the original movement established since the colonial period until de middle of last century. This inversion falls in a wider context of relocation of international migration after 1945, which relates itself within deeply social, political, economic and spatial changes throughout the world. Thenceforward, Europe concentrated a massive number of migrants coming from within its own borders which reflects its role in the international division of labor and its geopolitical influence. This foreign migrant quota has decelerated the decline of the populational growth in European countries, and meets the needs of the labor market, infiltrating themselves in places with decreased supply of labor, or in sections of labor that local people refuses to accept. The Brazilians living in Portugal tend to follow that pattern. However, the immigrants raise to the mainly receptors countries the matter of number and access to citizenship, this latter still strongly attached to the territorial state, which immersed in the globalization period, redefines itself due to the emerging of new actors in the international system. Therefore, the autonomy and sovereignty of these countries are constrained, especially over the migration politics to be held in a sense of serving their own interests. The international contemporary migration established, accordingly, a new content in the relations between territory, State and population. Thus, Portugal immigration politics undergoes the very ones of Europe, but, at the same time, privileges Brazilian immigrants and the African ex-colonies, with which still seeks invigorate political and economic links. Brazil, requested by its emigrants, starts to sew up politics capable of meets their needs. Home state and receiver state, therefore, share a hybrid population, luso-brazilian, that obligates one and another to relate and become a very component of its own strategies in entering the world. (AU)