Governing Strangers: How Brazil is managing immigration policy reform in a new era of immigration

Despite the fact Brazil is recently advocating for social justice and human rights in supranational organizations and forums, the country faces, among other social problems, the sad reality of having a very archaic and discriminatory immigration policy. The Estatuto do Estrangeiro (Foreigners’ Statute) from 1980 was written during the dictatorship years and considers, inspired by the Cold War, basically the paradigm of “national security”, seeing the foreigner as a potential threat. Brazil now faces though a new reality and challenges with a much higher inflow of immigrants and different economic needs. The current immigration policy seems therefore outdated and not suited to the new era of immigration. This research paper studies the historical immigration process in Brazil and the recent initiatives from the Brazilian government to reform its immigration policy to indentify the goals and values shaping the immigration policies and to see if there is a change of paradigm underway towards a policy with more emphasis on the immigrants’ human rights.