Resettlement to Brazil

Origins and purpose

Brazil reopened immigration with decree-law 7.967 of 18 September 1945, which kept a quota system and preferred, for directed immigration, families with at least eight members fit for work between 15 and 50. An agreement between the federal union and the state of São Paulo, approved by decree-law 9.534 of 31 July 1946, provided for European immigrants for agricultural and industrial work and let the state set conditions of occupation, family composition, nationality and port of departure. At the United Nations the Brazilian delegate had said that only farmers, technicians and skilled workers should come.12

The first bilateral instrument was the agreement of 1 April 1947 between Brazil and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees: an experimental group of a thousand families, not exceeding five thousand people, with single persons limited to 40 per cent of each group. Brazil kept the right of selection and the duty of reception, forwarding and placement, while the committee met the cost of transport. The quota was unfilled when the Preparatory Commission for the IRO took over on 1 July 1947, and an agreement of 30 April 1948 replaced it and created a joint Brazil-IRO commission.1

A later study of Brazilian selection policy records a further instrument earlier in the sequence: under President Dutra, whose term ran from 1946 to 1951, Brazil signed an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration pledging to receive 5,000 families of displaced persons. The same study dates the replacement of UNRRA by the IRO to 1946, when the new organisation introduced what it calls a global system of humanitarian-based population transfer.11

How it worked in practice

President Dutra sent three selection commissions to Europe, each of a chief, a labour ministry official, a consul, a doctor, a secretary and an interpreter. They left in late October 1946 without written criteria and without the register of labour shortages that the 1945 decree-law had required the Conselho de Imigração e Colonização to compile; that register was never made. The criteria were drawn up in the field by the head of the commissions, Artur Hehl Neiva of the CIC, who reported on 6 February 1947 and recommended taking, in this order, Balts, Ukrainians, Poles, non-communist White Russians and Yugoslavs.1

Demand at home shaped what the selectors looked for: mechanics of every grade, spinning and weaving workers, chemical and metallurgical specialists and coal miners, with family groups encouraged and the farmer of the older rhetoric still wanted. The Brazilian delegate in Geneva, Helio Lobo, toured camps at Frankfurt, Munich, Heidelberg, Salzburg, Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck over the winter of 1947 to 1948 and afterwards praised the qualities of those he had seen, among them that they were not communists.12

The head of the selection commissions was dismissed on 1 August 1947 after allegations, which the surviving record treats as unfounded, of poor selection on health and occupational grounds. The occupational cards used in the camps carried many errors, the commonest being to class people as farmers, so a fuller inquiry began at the Campo Limpo hostel itself.12

Transport was the organisation's own. For overseas resettlement the IRO kept a chartered fleet of about 36 vessels, booked space on commercial ships and aircraft and ran an average of 35 trains a month. The first group under the scheme reached Rio de Janeiro on 16 May 1947 aboard the United States Army transport General S. D. Sturgis, one of three transports operated by the Preparatory Commission, with 861 people aboard.1358

Arrivals entered through the port of Rio de Janeiro and were received at the Hospedaria de Imigrantes da Ilha das Flores in Guanabara bay, the last great intake in that hostel's history. Those bound for São Paulo went on to the provisional hostel at Campo Limpo, the Brás hostel in the city being occupied by the Escola Técnica de Aviação. The joint Brazil-IRO commission, installed on 15 December 1948, helped the national immigration department with reception, reclassification of occupations, registration, forwarding and welfare, and set up sub-delegations in seven states. Between December 1948 and August 1949 it forwarded 14,016 people of 28 nationalities.1245

Placement went into industry and agriculture, and the agricultural side went badly. Complaints turned on people classed as agricultural workers who were nothing of the kind, on wages that would not support a pre-war standard of living, and on the wish to become smallholders rather than employees. Industrial placement concentrated in metropolitan São Paulo.2

The same study sets out the order of preference in the same terms, with candidates from the Baltic countries the most highly desirable, followed by Ukrainians, Poles, Russians and Yugoslavs, and records that, as in the interwar period, Brazil remained unwilling to accept Jews.11

The Ukrainian experience within the scheme

Ukrainians stood second on Neiva's order of priority, and the Brazilian commission recorded excellent references for them. In the database of 18,369 entries for 1947 to 1951 drawn from the Memorial do Imigrante records, Ukrainians are 9 per cent, behind Poles at 26 per cent, records without a nationality at 19 per cent and stateless people at 11 per cent. That counts registered entries in the São Paulo documentation, not all Ukrainian arrivals in Brazil.12

For the country as a whole the Encyclopedia of Ukraine puts the third wave at about 7,000 Ukrainians arriving in 1947 to 1951 from the camps of Germany and Austria, socially more varied than the earlier waves, settling almost exclusively in the cities, and including many intellectuals who later moved on to Canada or the United States.46

The Ukrainian community settled in Paraná since the 1870s worked on the scheme from the receiving end. The Ukrainian Committee of Aid to the War Victims, founded at Curitiba on 9 October 1945, sent relief to the camps, kept contact with camp authorities, put immigration requests to the Brazilian government and, when one was accepted, undertook to find the newcomer a job and somewhere to live. Its archive holds more than three hundred letters written from the camps, almost all in Ukrainian.67

What happened afterwards

The joint Brazil-IRO commission was wound up on 15 December 1949 for financial reasons, and a last plan for a direct agreement between the IRO and the state of São Paulo, approved by the CIC in July 1950, was never carried through. Congress had approved the IRO constitution in December 1948, but the executive withheld ratification while it sought a foreign loan to cover an execution quota of 2.3 million US dollars a year. The loan never came.1

In 1951 the Brás hostel was returned to the São Paulo agriculture secretariat and resumed receiving migrants, and the provisional arrangement at Campo Limpo ended; a later museum account dates the reopening to 1952. The IRO was succeeded by the Comitê Intergovernamental para as Migrações Europeias, known as CIME, which agreed with Brazil that the European flow would continue and organised entries alongside bilateral agreements into the 1970s.249

The Ukrainian community the scheme fed into remained overwhelmingly a Paraná one. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine reports 78 per cent of Ukrainians in Brazil living in Paraná, concentrated in the county of Prudentópolis and around Curitiba, and 5 per cent in São Paulo state, most at São Caetano do Sul, where the Sociedade Ucraniana Unificação was founded in 1949.56

Selection from the German camps was still being proposed after the scheme had ended. With the German government unwilling to encourage the emigration of skilled workers, the Brazilian embassy in Bonn repeatedly suggested selecting technicians from among the East European refugees stranded in camps across Germany, with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.11