Immigration means the action and effect of immigrating. This verb refers to people who enter/enter a country (other than their own) to reside there, usually for economic, political or academic reasons. In other words, people who usually leave their homeland to settle abroad do so with the intention of getting a better job or studying at a prestigious school or university.
The complementary concept of immigration is that of emigration (people leaving one country to go to a different one). When a subject is an immigrant, he had to be an emigrant beforehand. For example: if Richard leaves the United States to settle in Chile, then he is an emigrant from the United States and an immigrant in Chile.
Migratory processes have always existed throughout human history. They are usually massive and take place in times of crisis in a given region, when thousands of people seek to emigrate to enter another country in search of a better quality of life. Nowadays, globalization is a social phenomenon that facilitates immigration, taking into account the development of means of transport and the liberalization of borders.
However, immigration tends to be criticized by certain social sectors in the host country. There are those who believe that immigrants are to blame for economic and social problems, although statistics show that immigrants, through their labor and the fact that they pay taxes, offer more resources than they consume. However, this does not prevent many immigrants from being discriminated against.
In Brazil, immigrants are divided into two types, namely:
– Those who are constituted in colonies (concentration), where they do not keep in contact with the natives of the country, at least not in the first moments in which they are constituted there, but as they establish themselves and start to produce products in the colonies, then they need to sell these products and then they start to get closer to the other residents;
– The second type are those immigrants who mixed more with the natives of the country, taking as an example the immigrants who dispersed on coffee farms in São Paulo and also in the cities.
In the formation and expansion of Brazil, immigrants were important figures in the process. For example, colonies such as Holambra, in São Paulo, created by the Dutch, or Americana, also in São Paulo, which was formed by Confederate emigrants from the United States who came to the country due to the Civil War. And there were also others like Blumenau, in Santa Catarina, which was made up of German immigrants.
In Brazil, the phrases provided great influences in the arts, social habits, literature and even in education. And in the case of the products produced by the colonies, there is the rural handicraft that had a considerable growth until it became a small or medium industry, which contributed to the industrialization process of the states of the southern region.
With this, we see that immigration leaves marks on a country’s culture , as well as on its economy and other areas.
List of Acronyms Related to Immigration
