Thread: CT - Many Brazilians leaving state for home country

Robert Miller
Published 8:59 pm, Saturday, February 16, 2013
stamfordadvocate.com

At the Fernandes Food Store on Liberty Street in Danbury, Emily Rebiro calls everyone "Honey" or "Sweetheart." She makes sure that, if there's something people want in her store, they'll find it. It's down the aisle, she says. Right there.

Rebiro works hard to keep her customers she has happy. In part, that's because of who she cheerfully is. But it's also because some of her best customers -- the city's Brazilians -- are no longer around. She has to keep the ones she has left happy.

"Oh definitely," she said, when asked if she's seeing fewer Brazilians in her store. "They used to be in all the time."

As a result, she said, she's essentially in the store all hours to earn enough money to keep it going. She's not drawing much of a salary.

"I'm working for free," she said.

Across the street, Calixto Jimenez at Discount Liquors agrees.

"It started maybe two years ago," Jimenez said of the disappearance of the Brazilian trade. "I've lost a lot of customers." He and his brother Juan say that loss is about 25 percent of their business.

Anyone who did business with the wave of Brazilian immigrants that rolled into the state beginning in the 1990s and peaked in the early 2000s, agrees that the wave is receding. The Brazilians are going home.

In Danbury, that's meant failed businesses and empty storefronts in the city's downtown.

At Eliza's Store on Main Street, its owner, Cleantes Xavier, pointed out that he and his wife, Eliza, used to have three stores on Main Street. They now have one; Eliza is working in Brazil.

"I think, maybe 80 percent of the Brazilians who were here are gone," he said.

It's showing up in city schools as well.

"It used to be skyrocketing," Augusto Gomes, administrator of the English as a Second Language, Bilingual and World Languages program in the Danbury school system, said of enrollment of Brazilian students in the city. "They were coming here by the truckload. Now, it's stagnant."

The receding wave of Brazilians isn't unique.

For a variety of reasons -- some having to do with the U.S. economy, some having to do with U.S. immigration policies -- immigration to the United States is down as a whole.

In May 2012, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that the huge flow of Mexican immigration to the United States had slowed to the point where the number of Mexicans coming into the country equalled those leaving.

Because so many of these immigrants are undocumented, it's difficult to know exact numbers.

For Brazilians, the counting can be even trickier, because the U.S. Census Bureau does not include Brazilians as either Hispanic or Latino.

So all the numbers concerning the great wave of Brazilians at its peak tend to be estimates, whether it is in the city, the state or the United States.

"Nobody has the numbers," said anthropologist Maxine Margolis of New York, who has written about the Brazilian migration. Her next book, "Goodbye Brazil," contains sections about Danbury.

Using estimates, the Brazilian government has said more than a million of its citizens left for the United States over the past 20 years or so.

Paulo Almeida, deputy counsel at the Brazilian Consulate in Hartford, said one estimate had 60,000 to 70,000 Brazilians living in Connecticut and Rhode Island -- legally and illegally -- during the peak years. That number may be down now to around 40,000, Almeida said.

"We think 20 to 30 percent have returned to Brazil," he said.

Immigration reform a factor

Why this is happening is complicated. Partly, it's economic.

What started in 2007 became very clear by 2008 -- the United States had entered a period of deep recession.

At the same time, the Brazilian economy -- in the doldrums for decades -- took off. It's now considered what some global economists call the four BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- that have the potential to be major economic forces in the world in the decades ahead.

Brazil is also the host nation for soccer's 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics -- events sure to generate jobs.

For that reason, Brazilians looking for work in the United States realized the jobs they were looking for are back in their homeland.

"It used to be the American dream," said Ester Sanches-Naek of Tolland, a former representative with Brazilians Abroad. "Now it's the Brazilian dream."

And, staying in the United States wasn't always easy. Many of these immigrants were undocumented -- most commonly they'd come to the United States on temporary visas, then stay.

"They'd think they were staying five years and would be 10," said Natalicia Tracy, executive director of the Brazilian Immigration Center in Boston.

These people live in limbo. They work in the United States. They earn and spend money here. They contribute to the local economy. But they are here illegally.

They know, at any time, they could be deported. And that wears on them.

Tracy said because these undocumented Brazilians fear returning to their native country -- because once they leave the United States, they'd have trouble returning -- they miss out of pivotal moments of family life. That adds to their frustrations.

"They can't go home for the death of grandparents, even for brothers and sisters," she said.

For younger people, the frustrations have to do with the educational system. Students who get their high school diploma can have a very hard time getting into college without citizenship or naturalization papers, a driver's license or a legal ID.

"It's not just Brazilians, it's all undocumented residents," said Camila Bortolleto, who, while undocumented, graduated from Western Connecticut State University with honors and is now one of the founders of CT Students for a DREAM.

"Really bright kids will be heading back to Brazil," said Sanches-Naek.

Emanuela Leaf, editor of Tribuna, the twice-monthly Portuguese-English newspaper in Danbury, also said that around 2001, the U.S. government allowed undocumented immigrants to pay a $1,000 fine, then apply for a green card. It may have taken 10 years, she said, but the people who applied and received a green card can now travel freely between the United States and Brazil. That may account for some of the departures, she said.

"We saw this coming," she said.

In Danbury, that sense of being on the outside of the system was more pronounced, local Brazilians said, thanks to the hard-line immigration policies laid down by Mayor Mark Boughton.

In 2006, city police pretended to be men hiring day laborers. They picked up 11 of those Latino workers -- the men that became known as the Danbury 11 -- and brought them directly to federal immigration agents. In the court settlement in 2011, the city paid the men $400,000, but admitted no wrongdoing.

And in 2008, city police partnered with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in a multi-year program to apprehend undocumented residents who had criminal records in their native countries.

The program resulted in only a handful of arrests over the years. It was also profoundly unpopular with the immigrant population within the city.

Many Brazilians living in the city moved elsewhere said Nilton Coelho, owner of Banana Brazil, a restaurant on Main Street in Danbury.

"They all left after ICE," Coelho said. "They moved to Waterbury or Bridgeport."

"There's a difference between thinking `I want to be here. I want to be part of the American Dream,' then feeling `They don't want us here,' " Leaf said. "After a while, people think `I can't do this.' They take a U-turn."

Boughton is totally unapologetic concerning his policies.

The city doesn't write immigration laws, he said. If his administration has had any tone toward undocumented residents, it is "to support the laws of the United States of America."

And, he said, if Brazilians failed to make a go of it in the city because they depended solely on doing business with other Brazilians -- who, as undocumented residents, may come and go rapidly -- that is not his fault.

"That's a bad business model," Boughton said.

But what's unclear is whether the wave, moving from the United States back to Brazil, will be permanent.

For one thing, Maxine Margolis said, wages are still much lower in Brazil than in the United States.

"It's great for the high-end worker," Margolis said. "But waiters earn as much here as white-collar workers or teachers there."

Another factor that may slow the return is immigration reform.

After November's election, there was suddenly a renewed interest in the White House and in the U.S. Congress to pass a comprehensive package of reforms that might give undocumented workers a path toward naturalization, if not citizenship. They could live in this country without fear of being picked up and sent home.

For that reason, said Breno da Mata, editor of Comunidade, a newspaper for the Brazilian community in Danbury, Brazilians who might be considering a return to their homeland may now be in a holding pattern to see if anything gets done.

"It seems there is a good chance something will happen," da Mata said. "People who are not here legally are preferring to wait. It may be their best chance."

Many Brazilians leaving state for home country - StamfordAdvocate

Many illegals come here, save money and return their own countries to live high on the hog. They had no intentions of ever staying here. Many of the illegals that I have known are living well off in their own countries because the money they saved here is worth so much more in their own country.