IMMIGRATION - BRAZIL - THE POLITICS OF SUBSIDIES FROM THE EMPIRE DO THE "ESTADO NOVO".

In Brazil, the political continuity in the transition from the Colony to the Empire contributed to maintain the central state structure. Indeed, an official immigration policy was more likely from an administrative and financial point of view to be pursued there, as compared to the politically unstable Latin American neighbors. The Imperial authorities developed an active land settlement policy in the frontier by subsidizing small-plot tenures in Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Parana’ and Espirito Santo. In 1876 the Inspectoria Geral de Terras e Colonizacao was created for the administration of all services related to the colonization, the promotion of spontaneous immigration or through private individuals and their reception. The objective of the Imperial Government was to establish a self-sufficient peasantry styled on yeomen in the United States. This project was revived, quite unsuccessfully, before the end of the Empire (1889) by the Central Immigration Society, promoted by a group of intellectuals in Rio de Janeiro under the patronage of Dom Pedro II.

On the other hand, the policy that became dominant at the time, promoted the massive immigration of Italian colonists to the coffee plantations in the western part of the State of Sao Paulo; this basically implied a model of landless laborers. Created in 1886 by the large coffee landowners in the state of Sao Paulo, the Sociedade Promotora da Imigracao began recruiting, subsidizing and bringing in thousands of peasants from Veneto. This activity, which was protracted until 1927, was later carried out by the State Secretaria da Agricultura. From an economic point of view, the triumph of this policy resulted from the primacy of the new landowners, established in the frontier territories in the State of Sao Paulo, over the traditional latifundia interests, located along the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The conflict which led to that configuration can be traced to the political debate over the Land Law in 1850.45 From a political and administrative perspective, the materialization of the great immigration represented the defeat of the central power of the Empire and the strengthening of state interests, to which the Constitution of 1891 attributed the jurisdiction over terras devolutas as well as the full financial autonomy.

Table 1 indicates Federal immigration expenditures between 1883 and 1897; Table 2 covers the years 1892 to 1910, showing the stronger incidence of immigration expenditures on the State of Sao Paulo budget as compared to the Federal one (see years 1892–1897), following precisely the approval of the new constitution.

Although a comparison between the two tables is limited to a six-year period, the figures show, also in absolute terms, how important the expenditure of a single State was. In 1897 Sao Paulo even spent over 6 times more for immigration than the Federal Government.

From an ideological perspective, the great immigration was perceived with highly contradictory feelings. If, on the one hand, the European inflow which occurred between 1880 and 1914 helped to satisfy the Brazilian elites’ desire to whitening the population, it also encouraged the first xenophobic attitudes. At the peak of the great immigration, the Decree N. 396 of May 15 1890 declared that all foreigners who within six months from their arrival did not express the will to maintain their original citizenship would automatically be considered Brazilian citizens. This decree however did not obtain the desired effect, since most foreign groups, and especially the Italian one which was the most numerous, usually maintained their original nationalities.

The difficulty to incorporate the various ethnic groups within the Brazilian society became more apparent with the increasing immigrant participation in social unrests. In a study centered on the political life in Rio de Janeiro during the Republican period, Murilo de Carvalho pointed out that in spite of the fact that “the first expulsion law was formally approved as late as 1907, there are records of foreign activists being imprisoned in the city as early as 1893. The first decree which actually denied entrance to immigrants “whose behavior is considered harmful to the public order or to the national security” appeared in 1921 (Decree N. 4247 of January 6, 1921), following a large series of general strikes in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, and the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The immigration restrictions enacted by the Provisional Government following the coup in 1930, and institutionalized by the Constitutions of 1934 and 1937, had instead a strong element of racial discrimination. Theoretically such restrictions were inspired by the quota law enacted in the United States in 1924, but major social and political differences existed between the two countries. In the US the law resulted from a conservative public opinion movement which originated at the turn of the century, amidst the last great immigration wave constituted by southern and eastern Europeans. These immigrants were considered ethnically inferior to the earlier waves of northern Europeans who had settled the United States since the XVII century. Already in 1882 the American Congress had approved a legislation prohibiting the entry of all Chinese. But the concern to preserve the Anglo-Saxon ethnic predominance in American society later motivated the discrimination towards Italians, Polish, Slavics, etc. In addition, the concern over the political consequences of the citizenship rights enjoyed by immigrants reinforced ethnic prejudices. The US legislation - in force from 1924 to 1965- finally limited arrivals to 150,000 per year, establishing quotas for each national group according to the proportions registered in the national census of 1890, when northern and western Europeans were predominant.

Art. 121, Section 6, of the Brazilian Constitution of July 16, 1934 established that:

"The arrival of immigrants in the national territory is subject to the necessary restrictions that guarantee ethnic integration and the physical and civic rights of the immigrant. Each national flow must therefore not exceed annually the 2 percent limit over the total number of its respective national group settling in Brazil in the last 50 years (January 1, 1884 to December 31,1933)".

In Brazil the whitening ideal still lasted in the 1930s but it would then serve as a justification for legislators against Japanese immigration. The older European immigrant groups would enjoy higher proportions of allowed entrances than, for example, the Japanese who had arrived as late as 1908. European immigration had constantly decreased due to anti-emigration measures adopted by the European regimes. On the other hand, Japanese immigration had grown from 2,673 arrivals in 1924, to 11,169 in 1928, to 24,494 in 1933. Between 1922 and 1932, “no European nation had reached the quota that would be fixed by the Constitution. It was because of these numbers that we finally accepted the amendment”. So did Miguel Couto justify the acceptance of the quota amendment in Congress. It was then quite evident that the constitutional amendment was mainly directed to restrain Japanese and Arab immigration. Differing from European immigration, which had received wide subsidies, the Japanese was only subsidized by the State of Sao Paulo between 1908 and 1922, and consequently by Japanese immigration agencies. The strongest critics against the quota system emerged precisely in the State of Sao Paulo which received the entire Japanese immigration. Since 1934, Japanese arrivals dropped sharply (1.548 in 1941 and none in 1942– 45).

In a study on anti-semitism in Brazil, it is argued that the establishment of immigration quotas was also meant to restrain the entrance of German Jews, in addition to that of Japanese and Black Africans. Many German Jews were indeed reaching Brazil in the 1930s as they escaped Nazism. Nevertheless a US scholar added a different emphasis to the issue of anti-semitism: the Estado Novo would have had a contradictory attitude towards Jews who, in spite of these restrictions, continued to be allowed to enter into the country. The great Jewish immigration occurred between 1924 and 1942 (approximately 60,000 people) and 1939 represented the peak year. Brazil was interested in a traditional European immigration but, since the moment was unfavorable, Jews then appeared as a possible alternative. Artur Hehl Neiva so defended the commercial and entrepreneurial qualities of Jews:

"We do not need simply peasants, but skilled individuals in all fields, and good tradesmen who know how to organize Brazilian trade abroad. This is practically inexistent since all shipping companies are foreign".

Brazil did apply very rigorous social and professional criteria to immigrant Jews, selecting those who had technical qualifications and capital. This new criterion would reappear more clearly in future projects for economic growth, particularly in “developmentalism”. Racial prejudices did not appear to affect Jews whose entrance, according to Lesser, was rather selected on economic criteria. Many public figures in Brazil showed a great interest for the professional qualifications and capital assets that Jews would bring into the country. In addition, although considered a less desirable ethnic group, the immigration of European Jews did not contradict the whitening ideal of the Estado Novo, especially at a time when the arrival of Southern Catholic Europeans had sharply dropped independently of the wishes of Brazilian policy-makers.

From an administrative point of view, the Revolution of 1930 opened the way for a centralization of many functions which were until then managed at a state level. The creation of the Labor Ministry in 1931, to which the Departamento Nacional de Povoamento (Department of National Settlement) was subordinated, would be a first step towards the absoption of all immigration measures by the Federal Government. Such reorganization clearly hit Paulista coffee planters whose political power was drastically reduced, as illustrated by the complaints of one of their eminent representatives, Henrique Doria de Vasconcellos, Director of the Immigration Service of the State of Sao Paulo. The coffee state attempted unsuccessfully to resume subsidized European immigration in 1935 due to the high per capita costs resulting from the imposition of too “insignificant” quotas.

On the whole, it would therefore be incorrect to argue that the Estado Novo closed the doors to immigration. In addition to promoting Jewish immigration, Brazil actively participated in the migration conference called on by the International Organization of Labor in Geneva on February 1938.57 That conference brought foreword the need to create a permanent migration commission by means of international funding in order to promote rural colonization, since many receiving countries, including Brazil, could not afford to direct their meagre public budget to subsidize immigrants.

Two months later, Vargas created the Conselho de Imigracao e Colonizacao, CIC (Immigration and Colonization Council), with Decree Law N. 406 of May 4, 1938. In spite of the new possibilities for the resumption of European immigration, the beginning of the War changed this promising picture. According to Arthur Hehl Neiva, a Government immigration advisor:

"The Council adopted far reaching measures. It increased the quotas of various countries, took advantage of differentials, made agreements with some nations to establish larger immigration flows, exempted Portuguese immigration from any numerical restriction, and so on, when unfortunately the war unleashed on the globe with all its consequences, deeply affecting the terms of the equation."

Article 86 of Decree Law N. 406 of May 4, 1938 prohibited the publication of books, reviews or newspapers in foreign languages in the rural areas of the country, and all such publications, even outside of the rural areas, were subject to prior authority from and registration with the Ministry of Justice. Earlier, Decree Law N. 483 of April 18, 1938 had already forbidden foreigners to run newspapers, reviews or other publications, to print articles and commentaries in the press, to grant interviews, give lectures, etc. Foreigners could not become civil servants, official interpreters and translators, dock workers, drivers, workers or entrepreneurs in fishing activities, lawyers, doctors, etc.

Although a 1938 decree ruled that ten years of continuous residence were required from foreigners before they could apply for the Brazilian citizenship, the legislation which discriminated immigrants from various urban professions or reduced their proportions in local firms ended up by pressing them to naturalize. The official statistics on the percentage of naturalizations among the foreign population confirm this argument: from 1 percent in 1920 to 11.8 percent in 1950. In addition the rate of naturalization appeared to be higher among males residing in urban centers. It is therefore possible to assume that such labor regulation has more the objective of assimilating foreigners than to protect Brazilian workers against immigrants. This would then justify its endurance even following World War II, when the official policy was again in favour of bringing European immigrants into the country.

Placed directly under the President of the Republic, the CIC stated objective was to “assure the ethnic, social, economic and moral integrity of the Nation”, as specified in the Decree N. 3010 enacted on August 20, of the same year. Among its various administrative functions, CIC was entrusted with the execution of assimilation policies, avoiding the concentration of foreigners in rural colonies which were to maintain at least 30 percent of Brazilian-born settlers, assuring the compulsory adoption of the Portuguese language in foreign schools, prohibiting all foreign publications, etc.

In addition, the sub-mentioned decree specified the new regulations for immigration. For the purpose of this study two elements will be emphasized. First, the decree clearly pointed to the intention of the Federal Government to fix immigrants in the hinterland in agricultural activities, as no mention of industrial professions is made. Art. 10 stated accordingly that “eighty per cent (80%) of the annual quota of each nationality will be reserved for agricultural workers and their respective families”. Also, “agricultural workers or technicians of rural industries” could not abandon their profession during a period of four consecutive years from the date of their landing. Finally, Art. 19 specified that the “Union is empowered to draw up immigration treaties for the purpose of settling agricultural laborers in the country”. It appears, therefore, that immigration was still perceived strictly in a rural dimension and that there was no clear urge, at least at Federal level, for using foreign workers in skilled urban professions.

Secondly, referring to collective permits, the decree unequivocally stated what were the criteria for selecting immigrants:

"The officer in charge of the selection will use extreme discretion so as to avoid loss to the National interests in regard to the ethnical assimilation and to economic, political and social security. The said consideration will be based: on the examination of individual traits, eugenic value, physical and moral qualities; on the examination of collective attributes of original inhabitants, especially in the study of their habits, their rural qualities, ... propensity for agricultural life and for secondary occupation..."

The eugenic requirement appeared candidly listed before any occupational or cultural one, thus indicating the priority of race over economic development. It should be stressed that the thrust of these regulations was maintained also in the years following World War II, and therefore cannot be regarded as an exclusive domain of the Estado Novo.

If on the one hand the assimilation laws—enacted after the attempted Integralist coup of 1938—embodied the response of the central state to the political activism of the Italian and German communities, they also expressed a renewed holistic desire to homogenize the entire society. The notion of eugenics—or the “refinement” of the Brazilian race through the white ethnic groups already present in the country — was central to the social and political ideology at the time. The statement of Rodrigues Valle that “in order to populate Brazil we do not need foreigners” referred mainly to non-white immigration.

Ultimately, the coming of the economic depression and the consequent unemployment favoured Getulio Vargas’ strategy to strengthen the relation between the Estado Novo and the native Brazilian working class. The nationalist discourse would become more credible thanks to immigration restrictions and later through the new labor legislation enacted on May 1st 1943. Such legislation compelled all industrial and commercial businesses to have in their payroll at least two thirds of Brazilian-born employees.63 Some historians have seen the so called “law of the two thirds” as a new orientation towards national interests. From another perspective, it seemed rather to reconcile two objectives: on the one hand, it fed the nationalist image of the government which finally proved to protect Brazilian laborers versus immigrants, on the other, it struck directly at the problem of citizenship, encouraging foreigners to naturalize.

In 1943, Vargas requested a special study by the National Council of Industrial Policy in order to identify some basic principles for economic growth. Roberto Simonsen was chosen to elaborate the report whose title was “Planning for the Brazilian Economy”, in which a model of growth based on five-year plans was presented.

The main objectives were:
• to provide the country with electrical power;
• to modernize agriculture;
• to create basic industries (metal works and chemical);
• to promote technological research;
• to create industrial banks and other financial institutions;
• to promote a selected immigration of skilled workers and technicians in order to expand production and strengthen the internal market, since “they are used to high consumption levels”.

The Simonsen report anticipated the immigration policy of desenvolvimentismo, in which the European entered as an essential part of the modernization strategy launched by the State. On the other hand, it anticipated a central argument in modernization theory during the 1950s, i.e. that immigrants would necessarily bring the technical qualifications and a more advanced culture which were necessary to unleash the new targets of the Latin American progress.

By Gloria La Cava in "Italians in Brazil - The Post-World War II Experience", editor Frank Coppa, Peter Lang, New York, 1999, excerpts pp. 15-25. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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