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OE Watch Commentary: Brazil is experiencing a déja vu of sorts on its border with Venezuela in the northern Amazon state of Roraima. Over 40,000 Venezuelans have crossed the border into Roraima and continue on to the city of Boa Vista, the state capital and home to 330,000 Brazilians. While nothing compared to the number of Venezuelans crossing into Columbia (400,000 at last count), the influx has increased the population of Boa Vista by over 10 percent, straining public and welfare services in the city and the entire state.
This has happened before. Following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, at least 10,000 Haitians risked their lives to travel from Haiti all the way to the Brazilian border in the Amazon state of Acre via a route that took them from Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic to Quito, Ecuador to Cuzco, Peru before arriving in Brazil. As in the current case in Roraima, the Haitians arriving in Acre were sent onward from the border post at Assis-Brasil, where there are no federal or state services to speak of, to the state capital, Rio Branco. Many moved on to the neighboring state of Rondonia, landing in the state capital, Porto Velho. Both the states of Acre and Rondonia struggled to assimilate and take care of the growing Haitian community.
Both the current Venezuelan and the former Haitian immigrations are fueled by a federal open border policy. However, it is the border states that become overwhelmed and desperate, as state governments continue to move new immigrants further into the interior and coastal states of Brazil. This practice alleviates stress on one state, while adding to another.
The strain became so great that the mayors of both Rio Branco and Porto Velho chartered passenger planes and flew many Haitians out of their respective capitals—one way flights to sprawling Sáo Paulo. The act was not taken lightly in Sáo Paulo and a very public war of words ensued between the state government of Sáo Paulo and the state governments of Acre and Rondonia.
Fast forward to today, according to the accompanying excerpted article from Folha De S.Paulo, federal ministers have been on a fact finding trip to Boa Vista. While there, commitments were made. Venezuelan immigrants will be registered through a census to determine who, how many, and what job skills they possess. They will then be moved to other states across Brazil to alleviate the strain on the state of Roraima and its capital, Boa Vista. There is no provision or surety that the other Brazilian states would be any more welcoming than the government of Sáo Paulo was to the Haitians only a few years ago.
Details are still unclear what the actual plan will be. Justice Minister Torquato Jardim said that they should be able to integrate Venezuelan doctors, engineers and other highly educated people into Brazilian economic life. However, these are the easiest immigrants to integrate into Brazil because they arrive with means and a high-tech skill. The article also quoted Minister Jardim as saying he wanted to “employ 1,000 in 90 days.” There have been questions that even if the federal government can pull it off in that time frame, it provides no answers for the other 39,000 Venezuelans left in Roraima.
If the Haitian experience is a cautionary tale (nearly all ended up in big city ghettos and favelas, with no meaningful source of income and dependent on social services and humanitarian work done by NGOs, like the Peace Mission in Sáo Paulo), the future does not bode well for the federal plan to relocate Venezuelans caught between a rock and a hard place, unable to have a life at home and struggling to find a new one in Brazil. End OE Watch Commentary (Billingsley)