SIGNIFICANT IMMIGRATION WAVES by Marcel Cassiano

 

     In recent years the Brazilians Immigrants will represent large increase in its population in the USA. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon are they Social factors, cultural and economic ... the relentless search for happiness often associated with professional success and later economic.

    The immigration of Brazilians to the U.S. is basically the hope for change!

Some sources claim that the earliest immigrants from Brazil to the United States were probably eight Jewish Brazilians who entered the country in 1654. But Brazilian American immigration information is not very reliable; the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service did not tabulate Brazilians as a separate group entering the States until 1960. Before that, Brazilians were counted in a group that included all South Americans. It is known that between 1820 and 1960, 234,761 people of South American descent entered the United States, with peak waves of South American immigrants entering from 1841 to 1850 and 1911 to 1930. It is impossible to tell how many of these South Americans were actually from Brazil. According to the 1960 U.S. Census Bureau report, however, 27,885 people of Brazilian ancestry were living in the United States.
From 1960 until the mid-1980s, there was a relatively even pattern of Brazilian immigration to the United States; estimates suggest that between 1,500 and 2,300 Brazilians immigrated each year, mainly from southern and south-central Brazil, including the states of Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. The majority of these immigrants were of European heritage and came from the middle- and upper-middle-classes of Brazilian society.
During the mid-1980s, Brazil's economy began to deteriorate rapidly; in 1990 inflation reached 1,795 percent annually. Despite the economic reforms of President Collor de Mello, incomes continued to drop by nearly 30 percent, and many Brazilians lost faith in their government. The Brazilian government estimates that between 1986 and 1990, 1.4 million Brazilians left the country permanently—many of them immigrating to the United States, others heading for Japan and various countries in South America and Europe.
According to Maxine Margolis in Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City, Brazilian immigration to the United States did not begin on a significant scale until the mid-1980s. Between 1987 and 1991, 20,800 Brazilians immigrated to America; however, 8,133 Brazilians entered the country in 1991 alone. Again, the majority of these immigrants were middle- or upper-middle-class members of Brazilian society, and most of them came from southern or south-central Brazil. The 1990 U.S. Census Bureau report indicates that there are about 60,000 Brazilians living and working in the United States, but because Brazilian Americans were only counted in the census if they wrote "Brazilian" in the "Other Hispanic" category— Brazilians are not Hispanic—this number is most likely too small. Other sources suggest that there are approximately 100,000 Brazilians, documented and undocumented, living in the New York area alone. In addition, there are sizable Brazilian communities in Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Miami, and Phoenix.
As Brazil's economic conditions worsened, the American consulate found that many more Brazilians wanted to immigrate to the United States than quotas legally allowed. Consequently, since the mid-1980s, a significant percentage of all Brazilian immigration to the United States has been illegal. The most common way for Brazilians to illegally enter the United States is to overstay a tourist visa, fade into established Brazilian communities, and obtain low-skill, low-wage work. A riskier method of gaining entry is with "doctored" or fake passports and/or green cards. A number of professional immigration services—legitimate and otherwise—operate in both the United States and Brazil to assist those wishing to come to America. Some Brazilians enter the United States on their own via the Mexican border, but this is extremely time-consuming, dangerous, and expensive. Undocumented persons make up a large percentage of the Brazilian population in the United States, thereby skewing census and immigration data. Margolis notes that there may be as many as 350,000 Brazilians living in the United States without proper documentation.

Read more: Brazilian Americans - History, Modern era, Significant immigration waves, Settlement patterns, Acculturation and assimilation http://www.everyculture.com/multi/A-Br/Brazilian-Americans.html#ixzz1IIM00eS2