I Love Brazil

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December 5, 2007

SouthAmerica: The New York Times published an article yesterday about this trend that has been going on for over a year.

I had mentioned about this exodus of Brazilians from the United States on this Forum many weeks ago.

Eventually the US mainstream media will realize that the exodus is not only of Brazilians but it is affecting many groups of immigrants - legal and illegal who came to the US various places.

The Legal and illegal immigrants in this case are like the canary in the coal mine - the legal and illegal immigrants are giving advance notice that the party it is over here in the United States.



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“Brazilians Giving Up Their American Dream”
By NINA BERNSTEIN and ELIZABETH DWOSKIN
Published: December 4, 2007
The New York Times

Like hundreds of thousands of middle-class Brazilians who moved to the United States over the last two decades, Jose Osvandir Borges and his wife, Elisabeth, came on tourist visas and stayed as illegal immigrants, putting down roots in ways they never expected.

After packing up their plasma-screen TV, scholastic trophies and other fruits of 12 prosperous years in the Ironbound in Newark, the couple and their American-born daughter, Marianna, 10, were scheduled to fly back to Brazil for good this morning. They expect their son, Thiago, 21, to follow in a year or two, despite his reluctance to leave the only land that feels like home.

… That decision — to give up on life in the United States — is being made by more and more Brazilians across the country, according to consular officials, travel agencies swamped by one-way ticket bookings, and community leaders in the neighborhoods that Brazilian immigrants have transformed, from Boston to Pompano Beach, Fla.

No one can say how many are leaving. But in the last half year, the reverse migration has become unmistakable among Brazilians in the United States, a population estimated at 1.1 million by Brazil’s government — four to five times the official census figures.

… In Massachusetts, says Fausto da Rocha, the founder of the Boston-area Brazilian Immigrant Center, his compatriots — many here illegally — are leaving by the thousands, some after losing homes in the subprime mortgage crisis. In New York and New Jersey, travel agents and others who sell airline seats say that one-way bookings to Brazil have more than doubled since last year, to about 150 daily from Kennedy International Airport, and that flights are sold out through February.

And at Brazil’s consulate in Miami, which serves Brazilians in five Southeastern states, officials said a recent survey of moving companies and travel agencies confirmed what they had already surmised from their foot traffic: More Brazilians are leaving the region than arriving — the reversal of an upward curve that seemed unstoppable as recently as 2005, when Brazilians unable to meet tightened visa requirements were sneaking across the United States-Mexico border in record numbers…


Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/n...c01d1114de7559a1&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS


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Quote from southamerica:

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December 5, 2007

SouthAmerica: The New York Times published an article yesterday about this trend that has been going on for over a year.

I had mentioned about this exodus of Brazilians from the United States on this Forum many weeks ago.

Eventually the US mainstream media will realize that the exodus is not only of Brazilians but it is affecting many groups of immigrants - legal and illegal who came to the US various places.

The Legal and illegal immigrants in this case are like the canary in the coal mine - the legal and illegal immigrants are giving advance notice that the party it is over here in the United States.



********


“Brazilians Giving Up Their American Dream”
By NINA BERNSTEIN and ELIZABETH DWOSKIN
Published: December 4, 2007
The New York Times

Like hundreds of thousands of middle-class Brazilians who moved to the United States over the last two decades, Jose Osvandir Borges and his wife, Elisabeth, came on tourist visas and stayed as illegal immigrants, putting down roots in ways they never expected.

After packing up their plasma-screen TV, scholastic trophies and other fruits of 12 prosperous years in the Ironbound in Newark, the couple and their American-born daughter, Marianna, 10, were scheduled to fly back to Brazil for good this morning. They expect their son, Thiago, 21, to follow in a year or two, despite his reluctance to leave the only land that feels like home.

… That decision — to give up on life in the United States — is being made by more and more Brazilians across the country, according to consular officials, travel agencies swamped by one-way ticket bookings, and community leaders in the neighborhoods that Brazilian immigrants have transformed, from Boston to Pompano Beach, Fla.

No one can say how many are leaving. But in the last half year, the reverse migration has become unmistakable among Brazilians in the United States, a population estimated at 1.1 million by Brazil’s government — four to five times the official census figures.

… In Massachusetts, says Fausto da Rocha, the founder of the Boston-area Brazilian Immigrant Center, his compatriots — many here illegally — are leaving by the thousands, some after losing homes in the subprime mortgage crisis. In New York and New Jersey, travel agents and others who sell airline seats say that one-way bookings to Brazil have more than doubled since last year, to about 150 daily from Kennedy International Airport, and that flights are sold out through February.

And at Brazil’s consulate in Miami, which serves Brazilians in five Southeastern states, officials said a recent survey of moving companies and travel agencies confirmed what they had already surmised from their foot traffic: More Brazilians are leaving the region than arriving — the reversal of an upward curve that seemed unstoppable as recently as 2005, when Brazilians unable to meet tightened visa requirements were sneaking across the United States-Mexico border in record numbers…


Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/n...c01d1114de7559a1&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS


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More...

Many Mexicans are heading back home and leaving to Canada as well. This will be one more dent in the economy...
 
Quote from southamerica:

"...The Legal and illegal immigrants in this case are like the canary in the coal mine - the legal and illegal immigrants are giving advance notice that the party it is over here in the United States...."
More...

Now wait just a damned minute! Bennie promised us that the party would NEVER BE OVER so long as he had a printing press. :mad:
 
Great article on the Brazilian exodus. I see it all the time lately in Florida. And it's not just Brazilians. I see many Argentine friends leaving, as well as Uruguayans. Some are not even going "home", but instead to Europe.

Thanks for the article.:)
 
Quote from TraderDrake:

Great article on the Brazilian exodus. I see it all the time lately in Florida. And it's not just Brazilians. I see many Argentine friends leaving, as well as Uruguayans. Some are not even going "home", but instead to Europe.

Thanks for the article.:)
More...

What's ironic is that Wall Street and the financial press is so tuned to the jobs number. They're microscopically looking at a few hundred thousand jobs. Yet under their noses literally millions of workers and jobs and their capital are leaving the country.
 
Quote from ShoeshineBoy:

What's ironic is that Wall Street and the financial press is so tuned to the jobs number. They're microscopically looking at a few hundred thousand jobs. Yet under their noses literally millions of workers and jobs and their capital are leaving the country.
More...

Maybe THAT'S the reason Nancy Pelosi wants to raise income tax rates to 60-80%, have a 100% wind fall profits tax on capital gains and to GIVE alien workers free health care, social security, and a house!
 
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TraderDrake: Great article on the Brazilian exodus. I see it all the time lately in Florida. And it's not just Brazilians. I see many Argentine friends leaving, as well as Uruguayans. Some are not even going "home", but instead to Europe.

Thanks for the article.


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December 5, 2007

SouthAmerica: As the NYT article said “the airlines are completely booked for one way flights to Brazil for the next 3 months.”

Anyway, a number of friends of ours who had been living in the US for the last 20 years moved out of the US in the last year – these were people who had green cards, and Brazilian and American citizenship.

Another friend of mine from India who also have been living here in the US for over 20 years just made his second trip to India to see if he can relocate back to that country.


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By the way, last Friday November 30, 2007 I went to New York City and met former President Jose Sarney this was the 3rd time I met President Sarney in 2007. We had a very pleasant conversation just the two of us and I mentioned to him my last article the 4-part series of articles about China investing US$ 200 billion in Brazil.

President Sarney it seems to me was interested on the subject and in reading my article and he asked me to send a copy of that article directly to him to his private email.

Afterwards my friend Domicio and his wife went out to a restaurant for dinner with President Sarney and his wife and I returned to New Jersey since I had a long trip to return home. In the way in it took me 2 hours to get where I had to go in Manhattan since I left my car in New Jersey and I took the bus and subway in Manhattan since this time of the year they don’t recommend that people drive in New York City because of traffic gridlock.

On Saturday President Sarney returned to Brazil.

In case you don't know - former President Sarney still is one of the most influential politicians in Brazil.


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January 7, 2008

SouthAmerica: On Sunday, January 6, 2008 The New York Times published an article about South America with a special spotlight on Brazil.

Among other things the article said: “the tide is flowing this country’s way. Brazil’s future is now. There are five reasons: land, raw materials, energy, the environment and China….”

There are some people on this Forum who still have not grasped that Brazil is moving into the future at the speed of light and it is transforming itself very fast into a country of the 21st century.

Personally I have given up completely on the United States, I have no illusions about the future of the United States, and all my future business efforts I will concentrate only on countries such as Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and China.

Today I was talking to a very good friend of mine who is living in Vitoria, in Santa Catarina state in Brazil - He returned to Brazil after living in the United States for more than 20 years and he told me that his son (34 years old) also just moved back to Brazil in November of 2007 since he thinks that Brazil can provide him with better opportunities than the United States at this stage of his life. He came to the US when he was 3 years old, and got his education here in the US, but he visited Brazil many times over the years, and today he thinks he can have a better future in Brazil than in the United States.



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Op-Ed Columnist
“New Day in the Americas”
By ROGER COHEN
Published: January 6, 2008
The New York Times

SÃO PAULO, Brazil - Juan Bautista Alberdi, an Argentine constitutionalist and liberal, noted in 1837 that “Nations, like men, do not have wings; they make their journeys on foot, step by step.”

Latin America, long susceptible to the utopian mirages of revolutionaries and caudillos and still not immune to them, has struggled to absorb this truth. But, as Michael Reid observes in his new book, “Forgotten Continent,” durable mass democracies have emerged across the region.

In recent years, these democracies have rolled the dice with an extraordinary variety of leaders, including Michelle Bachelet in Chile; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the metalworker who rose to govern Brazil; and Venezuela’s barracks-bred Hugo Chávez.

The results have been uneven. Chávez has tested everyone’s patience with oil-fueled bluster about winged Socialist revolution. But step by prosaic step, the continent has moved toward open societies and the global economy.

This progress has come despite gross income disparities, which have made cities like São Paulo labyrinths of riches and ruin. Lula’s unlikely rise reflected the hope that these social chasms could be bridged, just as the early success of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee reflects a society hungry for change and tired of hedge-fund titans skirting the taxes ordinary folks pay.

As they journey on foot, nations also dream. Democracies are inventive and averse to entitlement. Their imperfections are manifold, but so are their self-renewing mechanisms. They demand hope. The dynamic, over time, trumps the dynastic.

The Brazilian journey has often faltered, giving rise to the nostrum that this was a country with a great future condemned to its eternal contemplation. Annual murder figures in the tens of thousands testify to enduring social problems. Tom Jobim, who composed “The Girl From Ipanema,” noted that Brazil is not for beginners.

Still, as Lula has intuited with his astute pragmatism — is anyone else a friend of both Chávez and President Bush? — the tide is flowing this country’s way. Brazil’s future is now. There are five reasons: land, raw materials, energy, the environment and China.

Vastness defines Brazil; the agricultural use of its territory is nowhere near exhaustion. Already the world’s largest exporter of coffee, beef, sugar and orange juice, it is fast increasing exports of other foodstuffs, including chicken ($4.2 billion worth in 2007, up from $2.9 billion in 2006) and soya. More than 220 million acres — an area greater than that currently under cultivation — remain unexploited outside rain forests.

Another fast-rising export is iron ore. China, which is investing heavily here, wants all it can get, just as it wants food (as does India) and energy. Brazil has an abundance of the latter, and could have much more.

Set aside for a moment Brazil’s vast hydroelectric resources and its recent discovery of a huge deepwater oil field off the southeastern coast.

What will count over the long term is its world leadership in plant-based fuels, particularly ethanol from sugar cane, which produces eight times as much energy per hectare as the corn from which most U.S. ethanol is made.

Combine that with near limitless farmland, and Brazil’s important future-to-present shift comes into focus.

As Reid writes, “If China was becoming the world’s workshop and India its back office, Brazil is its farm — and potentially its center of environmental services.”

The country’s leadership in nonfossil fuels and the unparalleled biodiversity of its Amazon rain forest make it a natural leader in the 21st-century struggle with global warming.

None of the above would be significant if Brazil were unstable. But like most of the continent, it has become more predictable. China has realized this and is rapidly developing its commercial relations with Brazil and other Latin American countries. The United States has also pursued a range of free-trade agreements, with uneven results.

Over all, however, the continent has been left with a sense of U.S. neglect, sharpened by Bush’s unfulfilled pre-9/11 promise of a new focus that would reflect the presence of more than 40 million Latinos in the U.S. The next president should make looking south a priority, with Brazil as pivot for intensified engagement.

Latin America’s transformation in recent decades has been underestimated. It has been political and economic but also cultural. Deep prejudices against indigenous, mestizo and mulatto populations have been confronted and, if not defeated, undermined. In historical terms, this has been a time of empowerment for the dark-skinned.

The Americas are changing and, despite the anti-Yanqui rhetoric of Chávez, becoming — step by step — more one.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06cohen.html


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