For expats, Brazil is the country of the past

By David Wainer

President Jair Bolsonaro’s retrograde policies have accelerated the brain drain from Latin America’s largest economy.

As an immigrant from Brazil, I am often asked if I still have family in my country. After we first moved to the United States in 1999, we would go back every summer and alternate between Vovó Mercedes’ house and my four aunts’ apartments in Rio de Janeiro.

Today, there are hardly any family members left to visit.

My uncle, now a cardiologist in Florida, was the first to go. Some years later we left for Miami. Then, one by one, the rest of my family, including doctors, engineers and lawyers trained in Brazil, went to Israel. In one generation, an extended family of over 30 members has been uprooted.

The joke says that Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be. As crude as it sounds, a growing number of Brazilians share that sentiment and, despite their love for the country, have decided to leave for foreign lands.

The number of Brazilians living abroad has increased 35% in the last decade, and visa applications for high-skilled jobs in everything from software engineering to finance in the United States recently hit a high of 10. years of 3.4 million. In addition to the United States, other top destinations include Portugal, the United Kingdom and Japan, according to a study by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry published last year.

Heavy inflation and unemployment amid the pandemic have meant Brazilians can’t get visas to the north anyway. More than 56,000 Brazilians were apprehended at the US southern border in the last US fiscal year, compared to fewer than 1,500 apprehensions in fiscal 2018, shortly before Bolsonaro took office.

A small town in Minas Gerais, for example, is rapidly becoming empty as households sell their belongings to finance illegal travel to the United States.

Political and economic instability fuel migration not only in Brazil, but in much of Latin America. Commodity booms drive growth, and for a while, economies appear to be on the mend. But abrupt changes in policy or external shocks, such as a drop in world demand for soybeans, beef or oil, hamper growth and the march abroad accelerates.

To put it bluntly, Brazil needs to go from being a cattle ranch for the world (helping fuel the destruction of the Amazon) to an economy fueled by innovation.

Unfortunately, as the country becomes more politically polarized, so does the debate over the funding of education and science. President Jair Bolsonaro, who has warned that covid vaccines could turn people into crocodiles, has stoked skepticism about higher education and vowed to fix the education system.Marxist” from Brazil.

João Leal, a London School of Economics-trained economist who has written about Brazil’s “brain drain,” argues that Bolsonaro’s policies have had a chilling effect on the prospects of researchers and, more generally, of the upper-middle class of Brazil.

Before the pandemic, Bolsonaro was already at war with state employees in scientific positions who did not share his political views. He fired the director of the National Institute for Space Research for publishing satellite data showing a sharp increase in deforestation. The war on science intensified after the pandemic, with two health ministers fired for advocating policies such as social distancing.

More worrying for the academic world, says Leal, were the arbitrary cancellations of thousands of research scholarships for doctorates and the withdrawal of large sums of money for universities, almost bankrupting the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leading leftist candidate in October’s presidential election, promised to restore funding so that, in his words, the son of a “ordinary worker can become a doctor”.

Unfortunately, Lula is not paying enough attention to Brazil’s other problem: excessive state control over the economy and a dying private sector. While he has helped boost Brazilian markets by saying he would like to have centrist Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate, he has criticized Bolsonaro’s business-friendly approach.

Lula has also been coy about his intentions when referring to a much-needed tax reform. In addition to investments in education, structural reforms are needed to unlock growth.

Brazil is not the regional leader when it comes to emigration. The outflow of Brazilians has been partly overshadowed by a quarter of a million Venezuelans who have crossed the border in search of refuge in recent years. But the economic crisis in Brazil has strongly affected the labor market for people with higher qualifications, with underemployment and unemployment for qualified labor much higher than the national average, says Leal.

The departure of top-skilled Brazilians means the country will continue to lag behind the world when it comes to the key economic predictor of growth: productivity. Without improving its productivity, Brazil’s economy, now technically in recession, will have limited growth potential, according to Adriana Dupita, an economist at Bloomberg.

Most of my cousins ​​married Brazilian expats and are raising their children in a rich Brazilian culture abroad. They still preparesteak” with friends, speak Portuguese with their children, cheer on the national soccer team and listen to popular Brazilian music.

His feeling of nostalgia for Rio reminds me of “I came from Bahia”, by composer João Gilberto, about his hopes of one day returning to his home in the poor northeastern state of the country. Gilberto never returned. He died in Rio.

Nor, I suspect, will most of my family return to live in Brazil.