A Brazilian immigrant searches for a future
By Eduardo A. De Oliveira, Globe Correspondent | December 30, 2007

A lessandra Silva is worn out. After more than 10 years in the United States, the Holliston housecleaner thinks it likely that, next year, she will move back to her native Brazil. She hasn't bought a plane ticket yet, but Silva feels she has waited long enough for legal status that never seems to come.

"I can't take this routine of working, going to church, and back home anymore," said Silva. "It doesn't make sense to stay here, because I have no new goals."

At 35, with no husband or children, and following the deaths of her parents, she feels like she sacrificed too much waiting for permanent residency. Even so, returning home is a tough decision, she said.

Silva came to the United States in 1996 on a tourist visa. She said she stayed after the visa expired, hoping to save enough money for a better life in Brazil. Silva has tried several different routes toward legal residency. Most recently, in 2004, she applied for a religious worker's visa based on her unfinished education at a theological college in Brazil. For a while, everything seemed to be looking up. She even got her fingerprints taken, she said. But she is still waiting for a response.

"2008 will be the year I close one book of my life, although the chapters came out differently than I planned," said Silva.

If she does return home, she wants to work exporting stones for jewelry, possibly to the United States. But it will be challenging to break into that job market in Brazil, she said.

"Although it will be hard to find a job in Brazil, I believe anybody who has lived in America can live anywhere else," she said.

Recently, an exodus of Brazilian workers returning to their homeland has been highly publicized. In Framingham, the heart of the local Brazilian community, about a dozen Brazilian businesses closed in recent months. Community activists said it is at least partly because the usual customers are returning to Brazil, thanks to recent immigration crackdowns and the worsening exchange rate between the dollar and Brazil's currency.

Ilton Lisboa, a local advocate for Brazilian immigrants, said the Brazilian economy is doing well, but he thinks the people who are leaving are largely leaving because of disappointment that immigration reform didn't pass this year as hoped.

"The main reason why is because they become so disappointed with the Congress," said Lisboa.

That's the case with Silva. Her return would be less about financial concerns and more about frustration over her legal status.

In Silva's original plan, she thought two years of hard work in America would be enough to buy a couple of houses in Brazil and live off the rent they generated. During her first 18 months in Framingham, she worked 80 hours per week at three different jobs.

In December 1999, Silva called her mother in her home state of Minas Gerais and asked for advice. She had just finished financing the construction of an apartment atop her mother's house and was thinking of going back to Brazil.

"She told me to stay until I could get my legal papers," she said.

But four months later, she got a phone call. Her mother had died of a heart attack. The eldest of three sisters, Silva was very close to her mother, an evangelical pastor well known in her community.

"I felt completely lost," she said.

Silva's grandmother passed away on Christmas Eve 2004. A month later, her father also died.

"That was not the way I planned to see them again, in a coffin," she said.

Even though she is wrestling with how to make a new life in Brazil, she is already looking forward to returning to the United States some day and working here as a jewelry importer.

"America is a great country," she said. "It gave me a lot of chances. I hope one day I'll come back with a business visa."

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