Immigration

Immigration Research Report

When given the topic to write about three countries, their history and policies on immigration I felt that this would be an exciting task. Being allowed to learn about countries I otherwise would not have thought to learn about had I not been given this task to do so. So I decided to write on Brazil a country that I have always been fascinated about, Morocco because I have a close friend whose origins and family are from there, and Columbia another country that I have always wanted to visit.

First we will start off and travel to the beautiful country of Brazil. More like a continent than a country, the Federative Republic of Brazil (Repъblica Federativa do Brasil) is geographically larger than the conterminous United States. It is the world's fifth largest nation in physical size, exceeded only by Russia, China, the United States, and Canada. By far the largest country in Latin America, Brazil occupies nearly half the land mass of South America and borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador. With 90 percent of its territory lying between the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, Brazil is the world's largest tropical country. The Amazon Region has the world's largest river system; the Amazon is the source of 20 percent of the world's fresh water. Brazil's history prior to becoming an independent country in 1822 is intertwined mainly with that of Portugal. Unlike the other viceroyalties of Latin America, which divided into twenty countries upon attaining independence, the Viceroyalty of Brazil became a single nation, with a single language transcending all diversities and regionalisms. Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking Latin American country, and its Luso-Brazilian culture differs in subtle ways from the Hispanic heritage of most of its neighbors. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Italians, Germans, Arabs, Japanese, and other immigrants entered Brazil and in various ways altered the dominant social system. Their descendants, however, are nearly all Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. Except for a small indigenous Indian population, Brazilians are one people, with a single culture. Anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro attributes a "national ethnicity" to Brazil's melting-pot, disparate population, which has created a society that "knows itself, feels, and behaves as a single people." Unifying forces that have strengthened Brazilians' sense of national self-identity include the nation's multiracial society and its various religions; Brazilian Portuguese, music, and dance, particularly the samba and, more recently, Brazilian funk, a wildly popular version of the musical genres known in the United States as rap and hip-hop; the national soccer team, which won the World Cup championship for the fourth time in 1994; Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelй), widely acknowledged as the greatest soccer player ever, who won three World Cups with Brazil and was declared an official national treasure by Brazil's National Congress (Congresso Nacional; hereafter, Congress); world-renowned Brazilian Formula 1 auto racers, such as Emerson Fittipaldi and the late Ayrton Senna; and the country's television networks, with their widely viewed soap operas called telenovelas . Brazilian social scientists have used the concept of homem cordial (cordial man) to describe the Brazilian archetype. Brazilians are generally a friendly, warm, and spontaneous people.With an estimated 161 million people in early 1998, Brazil is the world's largest Roman Catholic nation, and its population is the world's sixth largest. In the year 2000 Brazil had an estimated 169 million people. Its population is largely urban; the urbanization rate soared from 47 percent in 1960 to 80 percent in 1996. Even the Amazon region is urbanized; 70 percent of its 18 million people live in cities. The Amazonian city of Manaus, which still lacks a sewerage system other than the river, now has a population of 1.5 million and a highway to Venezuela. Brazil has at least fourteen cities with more than 1 million people. Greater Rio de Janeiro's population totaled 10.3 million in 1995. Greater Sгo Paulo, with 18.8 million people, is the world's third largest metropolitan area, after Tokyo and Mexico City. Although Sгo Paulo's Metrф is clean and efficiently moves more people in one day than Washington's Metro does in two months, the megacity is disorienting and suffers from extreme traffic congestion and air pollution. To alleviate this situation, Sгo Paulo State in January 1998 revived a fifty-year-old plan and built a US$2.5 billion beltway around the city.

In the governmental realm, Brazil is the third largest democracy (after India and the United States). It has had civilian democratic rule since the end of the military dictatorship