Migration in Brazil has taken on a new form. After decades of decline since the 1960s, when arrivals were mostly from Europe, the trend has reversed since the turn of the twenty-first century. Between 2010 and 2022, the number of immigrants increased by 70%, with Latin Americans representing the majority. According to the most recent census, there are approximately 1,000,000 foreign-born and naturalized residents living in Brazil, representing just under 0.5% of the total population.
Another change was the sharp rise in requests for refugee status: between 2015 and 2024, there were 454,000 applications, 33% of which were approved. Unlike many countries in the Global North, where it is common to hold asylum seekers in detention centers, Brazil allows them to live freely while their cases are reviewed, which can take up to two years. Temporary documents give them the right to formal employment, access to the public health system (SUS), and to enroll their children in school.
However, these welcoming laws do not eliminate the deep vulnerability faced by nearly half of these immigrants. Christina Queiroz, our assistant editor for humanities, examined studies and data on the topic, as well as speaking with researchers and others involved in social movements and support centers. Her work is featured in this issue’s cover story, with photography by Léo Ramos Chaves. It is a subject that feels personal to me, as the daughter of an immigrant and the sister of an emigrant.
Enacted in 1997, Brazil’s Law 9,474 incorporated the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention. It was also in 1951, during the Cold War, that American physicist David Bohm arrived in Brazil—he himself might well have qualified as a refugee, a status granted to those facing persecution for their race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinions, or exposed to human rights violations. A former student of J. Robert Oppenheimer and colleague of Albert Einstein at Princeton University, Bohm was targeted by McCarthyism for his ties to the USA’s Communist Party. Shortly after arriving in São Paulo to take up a professorship at the University of São Paulo, his passport was seized by the US State Department. He was only able to leave the country in 1954, when he finally obtained Brazilian citizenship.
I was a student of Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida’s social sciences course. One day, she mentioned that she identified with the American historian John Gaddis, a Cold War expert. A professor at Yale, Gaddis once wrote that he constantly has to remind himself that for his students, that era felt as distant as the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BCE. “Maybe it’s time to retire,” Almeida said. Many years later, the political scientist is still active, as shown in her interview with our humanities editor, Ana Paula Orlandi.
Have you heard of cannibal rivers? This issue closes with a story that shows just how unexpectedly fascinating science can be. In a process known as river capture, aggressive rivers gradually absorb neighboring ones, causing them to shrink or vanish. The outcomes are not only curious—changes to riverbeds can have political impacts by redefining borders and economic impacts due to effects on soil irrigation and vegetation, with consequences for human occupation. Our earth sciences editor, Carlos Fioravanti, tells this story.
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