In Sickness and in Health

Abstract

Jeffrey Lesser¹ remarks that nothing allowed politicians to see their country as a “racial laboratory” more than the presence of immigrants. Immigration played an important role in public policy from at least 1850, when it became clear that slavery would not exist long into the future. Although most elites did not seek to use immigrants as a replacement for the largely exterminated native population (as was the case in Argentina), they did assume there was a high correlation between the influx of immigrants and social change. Jeffrey Lesser mentions that between 1872 and 1949, around 4.55 million immigrants entered Brazil and these immigrants challenged simplistic notions of race by adding a new element—ethnicity—to the mix.²