POPULATION: Brazil’s Youth Increasingly Opt for Emigration, Crime

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 9 2002 (IPS) - Many young people in Brazil are taking the routes of emigration or crime due to limited economic and career prospects, according to a new study by the Secretariat of Development, Labour and Solidarity in the city of Sao Paulo.

A total of 1,346,000 Brazilians who were between the ages of 15 and 24 in 1991 left the country between that year and 2000, according to the report, which is based on data from the last two national censuses. That represents 4.7 percent of the population in that age group, and a flow of 150,000 young people leaving the country every year.

Another factor leading to the shrinking of Brazil’s young population, besides emigration and a lower birth rate, is violence. In 1999, 116,778 Brazilians aged 15 to 24 died violent deaths. Of that total, 51.4 percent were murdered and 21.8 percent were the victims of traffic accidents.

In 1990 there were 25,264 violent deaths, 25.66 percent of whom were homicide victims.

In other words, the murders of young people rose tenfold in a decade, indicating that many of today’s youth, mainly among lower- income sectors, are turning to crime as a means of survival.

Meanwhile, emigration is increasingly becoming an alternative for middle-class youngsters, who can afford a plane ticket to North America, Europe or Japan and who have the skills to get by in industrialised countries.

Sixty percent of Brazil’s nearly 170 million people are under 29, according to the 2000 census.

The city of Sao Paulo study also highlighted that the population is ageing fast. The 1991 census showed that there were 13.9 people over 65 for every 100 minors under 15 – a proportion that had risen to 19.77 by 2000.

Four years ago, Giselle Soldati abandoned her studies in psychology and left her city, Juiz de Fora, in the eastern state of Minas Gerais, to join the wave of young Brazilians seeking new horizons abroad in the past decade.

Soldati was 23 in April 1998 when she found a job working as an au pair for a family in Los Angeles, California. She decided to move abroad because she felt frustrated over how difficult it was to study and make a living in Juiz de Fora, a city of half a million located 180 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro.

Her idea was to stay in the United States for a year and polish up her English. But then she moved on to waitressing jobs, and her twin sister joined her. She does not earn much by Los Angeles standards, just 1,500 dollars a month, because she is also busy with her journalism studies. In July she will complete the first year of her degree.

She will then decide whether to stay in the United States or try to follow her boyfriend, a Brazilian she met in Los Angeles, to Barcelona, in northeastern Spain, where he moved in February.

If her bid to obtain Italian nationality – her father is Italian – is successful, she could move to Spain or Italy, and thus be closer to her boyfriend and attend a European university.

“My dream is to go back to Brazil, but in conditions that would allow me to have a good standard of living, and a guaranteed future,” Soldati told IPS by telephone from the United States.

But she admitted that after spending a few years in the United States, it is difficult to give up the advantages offered by “the country of opportunity, consumerism and well-paid work.” To illustrate that, she recalled an 80-dollar tip she was left by one group of diners in a restaurant where she worked.

That is also the dilemma faced by Tiago de Oliveira, who spent 27 years in Los Angeles working as a chef specialising in Japanese cuisine. He held other jobs as well, working as a parking lot attendant and pizza delivery man, for example.

His plan was to save up enough money to open a restaurant in Brazil. But unexpected developments, including the Sep 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, set him back in his plans.

In a telephone interview with IPS, De Oliveira acknowledged that “you get caught up in the system, you buy a car and other belongings,” which makes it more difficult to resist the pull of the material and work possibilities that are offered in a safe, secure setting that is difficult to imagine in Brazil.

Today he earns around 3,500 dollars a month, “an amount I could never dream of in Brazil,” even as a chef in a posh restaurant, he explained.

All of this has led him to continue putting off his return to his home country, even though he says “I miss it terribly.”

Brazilians who go abroad generally do so with the idea of returning home someday, said de Oliveira. But he added that he knew many who had already spent over 10 years in California, and who were not likely to go back.

Most cannot even visit Brazil on vacation, as they are undocumented immigrants who would be unable to return to the United States after they left.

The fallout from Sep 11 has not curbed the flow of Brazilians heading to the United States.

Thales dos Santos, 24, dropped out of his third year in dental school in a private university in southern Brazil, and in October joined two friends who had already moved to New York, where he went to work delivering cell phones for 300 dollars a week.

He later took in a 23-year-old cousin, a last year law student who believed he would have better job opportunities in the United States. Dos Santos’ girlfriend also went to the United States to look for work, with a group of six other university students from Bahia, a state in northeastern Brazil.

But dos Santos told IPS by phone that he was only waiting for approval of his transfer to a tuition-free or less expensive university to return to Brazil and complete his studies in dentistry. He only decided to go abroad because his family could no longer afford the 720-dollar monthly tuition at the private university he was attending.

Besides the United States, the top choice destination, Europe and Japan have drawn many young Brazilians overseas in the past two decades.

Emigration to Japan has its own unique characteristics, with nearly 250,000 Brazilians of Japanese descent having moved to the land of their forebears to save up money.

The city government of Sao Paulo conducted the study on youth to better orient its social programmes.

One priority is to provide opportunities for youngsters without work experience to get their first job, since young people suffer the highest rates of unemployment, which have risen along with crime, according to Secretary of Development Marcio Pochmann.

In greater Sao Paulo – Brazil’s largest city, home to 17 million – the number of unemployed increased almost threefold between 1989 and 1999, climbing from 614,000 to 1,715,000, according to the Inter-Union Department of Socioeconomic Research and Statistics.