People for Export

If the exodus has helped in some way to alleviate the
unemployment problem the emigration of Brazilians
is mainly a negative fact for the country as most emigrants
are people with college degrees.

Adelle Mol

For almost five centuries as a land of immigrants, Brazil has been exporting more people than receiving them from foreign places. According to the recent study Estimation of Migratory Balances, Liquid Rates of Migration and International Emigrants, 2,355,057 Brazilians left the country between 1986 and 1996 while only 169,303 immigrants entered Brazil. This represents a negative balance of 2,185,755 people.

If the exodus has helped in some way to alleviate the unemployment problem in the country and is allowing those overseas to send hard currency back to their homeland, the emigration of Brazilians is mainly a negative fact for the country as most emigrants are people with college degrees. To make matters worse, a high percentage are between the ages of 20 and 35.

"Brazil is losing population in significant numbers," says professor José Alberto Magno de Carvalho, director of Minas Gerais Federal University's Cedeplar (Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional—Center of Development and Regional Planning) "Today, we are clearly an emigrant county. The Brazilian who is emigrating has a better than average socio-economic level and schooling. Naturally, a poor person has no means to pay to illegally enter the United States. If we don't change course, in the medium and long run, Brazil will be investing in people to lose them soon after."

In an interview with Brasília's daily Correio Brasiliense, Carvalho, who got his PhD in London in the early '70s, talked about the difference between Brazilian college students from his time and today: "The students of my generation used to get their PhD and come back to Brazil because the universities were absorbing researchers and perspectives were promising. The education of a doctor costs $150,000 to the society. But today, this doctor prefers to stay in the United States and make up to $30,000 a month instead of returning to Brazil and earn a salary that at best might reach $3,000 a month.

Carvalho estimates that in ten years the population of Brazil will start to go down if the drop in birth rates continues. While at the end of the 60's a Brazilian woman would have an average of 6 children by age 50, today this number has fallen to 2.2 children. The country is very close to the 2.1 children by woman needed to keep the population stationary. "That means in 20 years those emigrated Brazilians will be missed even more," says Carvalho.

For sociologist Mary Garcia Castro, who coordinates the CNPD's (Comissão Nacional de População e Desenvolvimento—National Commission on Population and Development) International Migrations Work Group the age of the people emigrating is the most worrisome fact of the phenomenon:

"The loss of workers is still not high enough to destabilize the Brazilian economy, but it is a disturbing trend. What worries me the most is it is not the lack of educated people, but that of youngsters, who are to become Brazil's educated people."

She says she cannot understand why some Brazilian sectors are worried about the number of foreigners in Brazil: "Foreigners represent less than 5 percent of the total workforce. The best thing in a crisis of employment is to look for a scapegoat. We cannot close the country's door as the United States does by creating restrictive measures for the foreign workforce, while at the same time using aggressive recruiting to draw qualified workers."

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