ABSTRACT
Brazil is renowned for its long history as a host country for immigrants, not a country of emigrants. Until the middle of the 1980s, hardly any Brazilians left their country to seek economic opportunity elsewhere. But with the economic crisis of the 1980s, which included a continually falling GDP and an average rate of inflation of 1,000 percent annually, a growing number of Brazilians, especially those of middle-class background (Margolis, 1995), began to leave the country, with the US being one of their primary destinations. Although some did come in with immigrant visas, the majority came as tourists. In 1991, for example, the US issued 265,752 non-immigrant visas to Brazilian citizens (Goza, 1994: 138). Many of these visitors overstayed their visas and found work in the US. Although the majority saw themselves as sojourners, not settlers, as time went by they began to put down roots and postpone their return (Margolis, 2007; Sales 2007). As a result, in 1995, according to demographer José Magno de Carvalho (cited in Menino, 2007), there were approximately 2.5 million Brazilians living abroad, with the majority (42 percent) residing in the United States.
