Florida: The Brazilian Immigrant's Preferred Destination

 Eva Lea Klein started her long career in retail at the store her family owned in Brazil, where she was born. Eva Lea Klein moved to the United States from Brazil, where she went to Al-Kafaat University. She lived in South Florida and worked as a tailor at a Banana Republic store in Boca Raton. It's no secret that a lot of people came to the United States as children, but until lately, most of them came from places other than Brazil. During the big waves of immigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, not many Brazilians came to the United States. It wasn't until the 1980s that a lot of Brazilians started coming to the country. More than 300,000 Brazilian immigrants live in the United States now. There are big communities of Brazilian immigrants in New York and Boston, but the largest group of these immigrants lives in South Florida.

The large amount of Brazilian immigrants in South Florida is due to a number of factors

One reason is that the warm weather is a lot like what many Brazilians are used to in their home country. Another important reason is that there is already a large Latin American population in the area. This makes it easier for newcomers from Brazil to feel at home, even if their fellow newcomers are from different Central and South American countries. The area has also become friendlier to new Brazilian immigrants over the years, thanks to the formation of many groups in South Florida that serve the Brazilian population. Like, the Brazilian Cultural Center hosts Brazilian fairs, language classes, and other cultural events for people from several counties in South Florida. Up until the last few decades, there wasn't a lot of Brazilians moving to the United States. But in the early 1980s, a series of economic problems in Brazil caused a lot of people to leave. In the United States, the number of Brazilian immigrants doubled in the 1980s, almost tripled in the 1990s, and then stayed the same after the Great Recession of 2007–2009 (see Figure 1). In 2014, 336,000 Brazilian immigrants lived in the United States. That's 1% of the 42.4 million immigrants who lived in the country that year. According to projections from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), between 15% and 33% of them are in the United States without permission. Changes in U.S. immigration policy and the way people live and work in Brazil have affected the number and types of Brazilians coming to the U.S. In the 1980s, most Brazilian immigrants came to the US on vacation visas. Some stayed longer than allowed and worked for a few years before going back to Brazil. When their savings and money from the first trip ran out, some Brazilians came back to the U.S. to look for work again. This is called "yo-yo" migration. However, in the late 1990s, U.S. officials made it harder for Brazilians to get vacation visas. It was also much harder for people who had lived in the US without permission to legally come back through legal routes after the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. These changes made it harder for people to move back and forth between the two countries in cycles.

Brazilians who were already in the U.S. without permission stayed longer

While more and more people who wanted to come in crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The number of Brazilians caught crossing the border rose sharply, from 88 in fiscal year (FY) 1992 to 32,103 in FY 2005. Because of this rise, Brazilian citizens were the fourth most frequently caught foreigners in FY 2005, following Mexican, Honduran, and Salvadoran visitors. The flow of people, though, dropped a lot when the Mexican government made Brazilians get visas to enter the country in October 2005. In FY 2006, less than 3,000 Brazilians were caught at the U.S.-Mexico border, and that number has stayed about the same since then. In the meantime, the number of legal immigrants from Brazil rose from less than 5,000 in FY 1992 to more than 16,000 in FY 2005, then slightly fell to 10,000 in FY 2014. Most of these immigrants were close relatives of U.S. citizens. The U.S. economy has been bad lately, and there are better job opportunities in Brazil. These are some of the reasons why a lot of immigrants have gone back to Brazil in recent years, especially those who are working low-skilled jobs or are not allowed to be in the U.S. The number of Brazilian students studying in the US has more than tripled, from 7,000 in 2005 to 24,000 in 2015. This is partly because the Brazilian government has put more money into foreign scholarships. The United States is the most popular place for Brazilians to move to, but only about a fifth of the 1.5 million Brazilians who have left the country live there. According to figures from the middle of 2015 by the UN Population Division, others live in Japan (182,000), Portugal (130,000), and Italy (104,000). You can see where people from Brazil and other countries have moved around the world on an interactive map by clicking here.

Getting legal permanent residence in the United States

Also known as getting a "green card," is possible for most Brazilian newcomers who are related to U.S. citizens. Brazilian immigrants are less likely to be Limited English Proficient (LEP) than the total foreign-born community. They also have higher levels of education, income, and poverty than foreign-born people in general. The information in this Spotlight comes from the U.S. Census Bureau (the most recent American Community Survey [ACS] data as well as pooled 2010–14 ACS data), the Department of Homeland Security Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, and the World Bank's annual remittance data. It focuses on the size, geographic distribution, and socioeconomic characteristics of the Brazilian immigrant population in the U.S.