Brazil - Migration

Between 1821 and 1945, approximately 5.2 million European immigrants entered Brazil, most of them settling in the south. Brazil has the largest expatriate Japanese colony in the world, numbering more than one million. In recent years, because of the increasing prosperity of Europe and Japan, there has been less desire to migrate to underdeveloped rural Brazil or its inflation-harassed industrial cities. Moreover, immigration is controlled by laws limiting the annual entry of persons of any national group to 2% of the total number of that nationality that had entered in the preceding 50 years. As of 2000, Brazil was hosting some 2,700 refugees. Some 80% of refugees come from Africa. The total number of migrants in 2000 was 546,000.