The American Dream: Why Brazilians are Moving to the US

 People from Brazil who want to live abroad most often choose to move to the United States. This is why there are so many Brazilians living there. This choice is based on a lot of factors, including job prospects, safety, quality of life, language, and way of life. According to information given by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2017, there are now about 1.4 million Brazilians living in the United States. AG Immigration says that more and more qualified people are leaving Brazil to find better job chances and more safety in the United States. People with the right skills have been looking for a new life abroad with their families. Florida, California, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey are the five U.S. states where 73% of the people who live there are from Brazil. More than 300,000 Brazilians live in Florida, according to Itamaraty. Miami has the third-largest Brazilian population of any city in the country. An estimate from Itamaraty says that there are about 350,000 Brazilians living in the state of Massachusetts, mostly in the Greater Boston area.

Most Brazilians live in towns like Framingham that are close to Boston

There are almost 30,000 Brazilians living in New Jersey. In that area, the city of East Newark has the most people who were born or are related to Brazilians. City-Data lists the following as the top 5 U.S. communities with the highest number of people born in Brazil:

Florida and Loch Lomond 15.8% Bonnie Loch-Woodsetter North, Florida 7.2% North Bay Village, Florida 7.1% East Newark, NJ 6.7%

The town of Framingham 6.6%

More people from Brazil are moving to the United States, which has made Brazilian American communities more noticeable and easier to understand. In 2017, statistics showed that Brazilian immigrants are younger than other immigrants and a little older than people who were born in the United States. Individually, this group has a high level of education, works more often than normal, and is more likely than other immigrant groups to be fluent in English. Fourteen percent of Brazilian Americans aged 25 and up have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to thirty-one percent of all foreigners and thirty-two percent of Americans born in the United States. They are also more likely than the average person to be working and have better household incomes than both foreign-born and native-born people. A little over three quarters of Brazilian Americans work in service jobs, while the other quarter work in management, business, science, or the arts. According to a study from Brown University, most Brazilians come to the U.S. with the plan to work for three to five years. Most of them wanted to save money so that when they got back to Brazil, they could buy homes or start businesses. This is what a "yo-yo migration" pattern looks like.

Brazilians who live in the U.S. still have strong ties to their home country and often move back and forth between the two

The World Bank says that over $3.5 billion was sent to Brazil from around the world in 2020.

Some well-known Brazilian Americans are the late singer and actress Carmen Miranda, the model and businesswoman Gisele Bundchen, and Fabrizio Moretti, who was born in Rio de Janeiro and plays guitar in the rock band The Strokes. The father of JetBlue, businessman David Neeleman, was born in Sao Paulo and grew up in Utah. Statistics show that not many Brazilians moved to the US before 1980. The first waves of movement happened in the 1980s and 1990s, when Brazil's economy was bad and prices were way too high. From the 2000s to the early 2010s, the numbers stayed the same. However, between 2014 and 2017, they went up because of a slowdown in Brazil in 2013. Along the way, they've brought their language, food, music, and other customs from Brazil. Brazilians are one of the foreign groups in the US that has grown the fastest in recent years. From 2010 to 2017, the number of people coming from Brazil rose by 32.8%. From 2010 to 2017, the number of immigrants from Brazil rose from 340,000 to 451,000. During that time, this made Brazil the 12th fastest-growing place of origin for people coming to the United States. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people living in the United States who were born in Brazil. This number had doubled by the 1990s and hit over 200,000 by 2000. By 2010, it had reached 340,000 and by 2017, it had reached 451,000.

Brazil has a history of people leaving the country rarely. In fact, there hadn't been a steady and major outflow until the 1980s. The main reason almost all Brazilian refugees to the US gave for leaving their home country was to find better economic conditions elsewhere. It has become common to call these people who come to the US "economic refugees." They came to find better jobs, lower costs of living, and to get away from the hyperinflation that hit Brazil from 1985 to 1994. But even though prices have been stable since 1994, when inflation stopped, salaries for middle- and low-class Brazilians have lost an average of a third of their purchasing power.

People from Brazil come to the US because they know they can make up to four times as much working the same jobs as they do back home

Having the chance to save a lot of money is probably the main reason why Brazilians want to move to the United States. Additionally, even though more Brazilians than ever are going to college, the job market for professionals has not grown at the same rate as the number of people going to college. A lot of Brazilians have come to the U.S. for more than just "economic reasons." They also want to experience the first-world modernity that has become famous and idealized in Brazilian pop culture. There were a lot of Brazilians coming to the United States between 1985 and 1987, mostly because of very high prices in Brazil during that time. However, the census of 1980 showed that 44,000 Brazilians who were born in the U.S. were living there. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, immigration kept going. A lot of Brazilians come to the U.S. on vacation visas and stay even after their visas run out, leaving them without papers. Because it's getting harder to get a tourist visa, arriving illegally through the Mexico border is becoming more popular. The U.S. government also put in place tighter immigration rules after 9/11, which make it harder to work without papers. After 2008, people's love for the United States also faded because of a downturn in the world economy that made it harder for people in the US and refugees from Brazil to find work and make money.