After a tearful farewell, Ana Paula Souza, her husband and her arms-length son left for the United States, one of hundreds of families who left the small mining town of Alpercata in recent months.
Alpercata, 330 kilometers from Belo Horizonte (MG), has been sending its residents to the US for decades, but now that the local population is facing a pandemic that is destroying jobs and causing double-digit inflation, migration from the rural town with okra plantations has become turned into an exodus.
Municipal data suggest that hundreds of families in Alpercata, which is home to around 7,500 inhabitants, took their children out of school and sold their belongings this year to finance a trip to the United States. The city’s bakery lacks manpower, civil servants have left their posts and local football teams are running out of players.
“Alpercata is getting empty,” said 23-year-old Souza. “Everyone is leaving Alpercata”.
Today she lives in Orlando, Florida, selling cakes to supplement her husband’s worker income and pay off $15,000 in debt with a people smuggler.
The stampede from Alpercata and nearby small towns underscores the lasting impact of the pandemic that has already killed more than 600,000 people in Brazil — a figure only lower than that of the United States.
It also reflects the leap in migration to the US of people from Latin America, a region hit hard by the virus. Record numbers of Brazilians, Haitians and Venezuelans are pouring into the US southern border and swelling the ranks of hopefuls from traditional immigration hubs like Mexico and Central America.
Brazilians rank sixth among foreigners held there in the US fiscal year 2021, according to data from the US Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP). More than 56,730 were arrested, adding pressure for US President Joe Biden to stop the flow.
It will not be easy. The buoyant US job market and a strong dollar that makes remittances sent to Brazil last longer are proving difficult to resist.
immigration waves
Unlike previous waves of immigration, dominated by poor young men who were soon returning home, the current one is attracting workers in the administrative sector that Brazil will find it harder to replace, officials, academics and police told Reuters. Nurses, engineers and even city employees with job security are leaving, many with no plans to return.
In Alpercata, nearly 5% of the city’s 162 employees, the city’s main employer, fled to the US this year, officials said, citing city data.
Many are taking their families, capitalizing on an American asylum policy that allows some nationalities, including Brazil, to remain in the country while applying for residency — a legal process that can take five years.
In total, 99% of Brazilian families that were apprehended on the US southern border in fiscal year 2021 filed for immigration court cases, according to CBP data.
The consequences can be seen in Alpercata’s municipal schools, which have already lost 10% of their 926 students this year, said Lucélia Pimentel, the city’s education secretary. More of them leave each day, she added.
Many of these families end up joining Brazilian diaspora communities in Florida or Massachusetts and occupying some of the nearly 10.4 million jobs currently unoccupied in the US.
“Americans don’t like to work, so there’s a lot of work for immigrants,” said Souza, a newcomer to Orlando.
City is “shrinking”
Signs that Alpercata is shrinking are obvious.
On city hall premises, where mangoes hang like Christmas ornaments from a thicket of trees, an excavator lay unused in early November. Officials say the machine has been idle since its only trained operator emigrated a few weeks ago.
In his office on the second floor, Municipal Sports Secretary Jorge Estefesson showed a visitor a wall decorated with photos of old football teams. Repeating names from memory, he pointed out more than a dozen players who now live in the US.
Most Brazilian immigrants arrive in the US via Mexico, where they enter without visas as tourists. Some take flights to Mexican border towns and turn themselves in to US authorities to seek asylum. To halt its journey to the currency, the US pressured Mexico to cancel visa waivers for Brazilians, as Reuters reported last month. As of mid-December, Mexico will require a Brazilian visa.
But Brazil’s fragile economy continues to push people north, one US official and four Brazilians told Reuters.
Last month, Reuters reported that Brazilian smugglers, known as “coyotes”, are taking advantage of the country’s ills for their own sake. Police claim that many of the largest coyotes are from the eastern Minas Gerais region that includes Alpercata.
(Additional reporting by Brad Haynes, in São Paulo)
Reference: CNN Brasil
