The Brazilian ‘diaspora’

Abstract

Not only do Brazilians represent a ‘new migrant group’ in the UK (Vertovec 2007) but also the very notion of Brazilian ‘emigration’ is a relatively novel one. While Brazil has a long history of receiving immigrants, from Europe since the mid-nineteenth century and from Japan and other parts of Latin America since the early twentieth century, flows in the opposite direction are much more recent (Patarra 2005; see also Lesser 1999). While migratory flows to Brazil continue, emigration is more prevalent and, according to recent estimates from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations (MRE), over three million Brazilians currently live outside Brazil, a figure that has more than doubled since 1999 (MRE 2011). Based on existing studies of Brazilian migrant communities in the UK and elsewhere, together with empirical research carried out for this project, this chapter is an attempt to bring some contextual coherence to current understandings of migration flows between Brazil and London. It also refers to primary data collated from a quantitative survey carried out among Latin American migrants in London (McIlwaine et al. 2011) and in which I was involved as a researcher, with additional information from a recent survey conducted among London’s Brazilian community (Evans et al. 2011).¹