The second Brazilian migration wave: The impact of Brazil’s economic and social changes on current migration to the UK.

Abstract

This article explores the effects of Brazil’s recent economic growth and the narrowing of the inequality gap on the second Brazilian migration wave to the UK over the last two decades. Migration-related research has emphatically argued that this ongoing international mobility results from transnational networks developed by pioneers who encouraged fellow citizens to travel. Although this paper considers social networks as an important factor shaping the movement of Brazilians abroad, we propose to debate contemporary Brazilian migration by shedding light on the national socio-economic policies implemented since the late 1990s. Thus, through a rigorous literature review of Brazilian transnational migration studies and multi-sited ethnography in Brazil and London, we focus particularly on how the opening up of the Brazilian economy to international capital flow, and the implementation of social programmes followed by the enlargement of its domestic consumer market, helps to explain the current increase and diversification of Brazilians abroad.

Brazilians in Spain: communication and transnational activism in a context of economic-political crisis

“…Assis (2017) examines the intensification of Brazilian emigration throughout the 1990s, which was articulated and nourished by social networks that were constituted through migratory process, favoring the connections of goods, resources, information and the conformation of transnational communities that link immigrants' countries of origin and destination. North, Dias and Martins Junior (2018) recognize in these networks important dynamics in the global mobility of Brazilians, and raise another structural argument: the current increase and diversification of class, gender, and regions of origin of Brazilian emigration flows can be related to the socioeconomic policies implemented in Brazil since the late 1990s. In a study of Brazilians in London and returnees in Brazil, the authors distinguish aspects of these policies -such as Brazil's economic opening to international capital flows, the implementation of social programs and the expansion of the internal market-which were responsible for promoting the structural conditions that facilitated the creation of social networks and increasing Brazilian emigration to the United Kingdom.…”