GOVERNADOR VALADARES doesn’t look like a city in the throes of a great social upheaval. Set amid an endless sweep of coffee plantations and tropical forest in landlocked Minas Gerais state, and reached by way of a turbo-prop plane that swings low into the valley on its twice-daily approach, the city has the detached, languid air of a remote country town.
Brasilia is 1,000km to the west, Sao Paulo almost as far to the south. Were it not for Ibituruna, a soaring volcanic peak that lures intrepid paragliders, or the gem mines that mark the surrounding countryside, you might think, Valadares would scarcely attract a glance from the outside world.
And yet the city has made quite a name for itself by turning its own attention outwards. Ask about emigration in Brazil and the conversation invariably turns to Valadares, a town which, more than any other in the country, is synonymous with the high emigration of the past two decades.
In that time, it is estimated, more than 80,000 people – about a third of its current population – have left here for New England and Florida. Today, nearly every family has someone living in the US. So important has been the flow of American currency back to the city – it amounted to half the city budget until recently, by some estimates – that some had taken to calling it Governador Vala dolares.
The city’s link to the US stretches back to the 1940s, when American companies first came to the area seeking mica, a heat-resistant mineral, to help the war effort. That contact led the first migrants to be seduced into moving north and set in train a flow that would define the city for the rest of the century. Today, beyond the veneer of the Brazilian everytown, signs of the link abound. There seems to be an English-language school or a travel agency at every turn, while on the outskirts of the city the large houses modelled on Hollywood’s cliché of American suburbia are hard to miss.
There’s a grandiloquently named World Trade Centre, a “Marlborough building” and an Edificio Framingham, after the Massachusetts town with one of the biggest Brazilian populations in the US. Halloween is celebrated here. “We have a lot of young kids called Michael too, and a lot of Johns,” says Lierte Junior, a prominent city councillor. “And we already have some Obamas.”
BUT AFTER PROSPERINGfor decades, Valadares now finds itself in the midst of an ever-deepening crisis. Across the rich world, the recession has led to a rise in unemployment and a fall in demand for foreign workers, which has caused global remittances – money sent home by migrants – to decline for the first time in a generation. Faced with the prospect of a backlash, western governments have been imposing stricter admission criteria and, in some cases, encouraging immigrants to return home. And because they are disproportionately young, unskilled, employed in the worst-hit sectors, and therefore especially vulnerable to the downturn, many migrants have been opting to do just that, leading some economists to suggest that the biggest turnaround in global migration flows since the 1930s may be under way.
If Governador Valadares epitomised the gains to be made from the era of mass mobility, it now stands as a totem for the cumulative effects of its potential unravelling. A city that was once awash with dollars has seen its city budget slashed by the decline in remittances. Shops have closed, investment has stalled, and the city is struggling to cope with a steady flow of returning emigrants from the north. Among them are 39-year-old Gutemberg Grobério, his wife Tatiane and their two children. Just six months ago, the family were enjoying the sort of life that helps explain why Valadarenses were seduced for so long by the promise of the American Dream. When they celebrated last Christmas in Orlando, Florida, they owned a $1 million (€707,700) house, two big cars and a boat – all funded by Gutemberg’s wood-floor business which, at the height of America’s house-building boom, gave him an income of $8,000 a month. Despite the couple being undocumented in the US – he was there for 18 years, she for eight – Gutemberg had been able to send home enough money for his mother to buy herself a new house.
But as the US economy began to contract and the building industry drew to a halt, Gutemberg found himself struggling to find work, leaving the family dependent on income from Tatiane’s work as a housekeeper. The bills began to accumulate, and before long they had defaulted on the mortgage. “The bills were driving us crazy over there,” says Gutemberg, sitting in the kitchen of his father-in-law’s house in Valadares. “Every time, the phone was ringing. ‘Why aren’t you paying your insurance? Why aren’t you paying for your car? Why aren’t you paying this and that?’ The bank kept asking us, ‘Why didn’t you pay the mortgage this month?’ I said, ‘Man, I don’t have a job. Look around.’” By the time Tatiane lost her job, their difficulties had become intractable.
She recalls the day she came home to find a note from the bank pinned to the front door. “It said, if we didn’t leave within 24 hours, they would throw our things out. We had stopped paying the mortgage because we didn’t have the money any more to pay for it.” With their children Leticia (12) and Lucas (9), the couple packed their belongings and moved to Tampa, where a friend sold them a mobile home on the cheap, but after four months the bank came looking for that as well, leaving them with no choice but to ask Tatiane’s parents to help them buy their one-way tickets back to Brazil.
On a sultry evening in Valadares, the couple still struggle to make sense of how their success could have turned out to be so precarious. Today, they are without a home, a car or a job between them, and adapting to life back in Brazil has been trying. Their daughter Leticia has trouble reading and writing in Portuguese; she complains of finding it hard to make new friends, and regrets that she never got to say goodbye to her old ones in Orlando. The couple describe Brazil like outsiders; Tatiane despairs of the bureaucracy, Gutemberg has been taken aback by the general chaos of life.
And in a town where successful emigrants flaunt their success by making a point of buying houses on streets where they once rented, there’s also the lingering feeling that neighbours look on them as failures for having returned with nothing to show for their years abroad. “It happens. People think that because you went over there, you have to come back rich,” Tatiane says. “We had everything over there – a job, money, a house, everything.
“Now?” Her voice trails off. “Now we have to start all over again.”
THE AUTHORITIES INValadares do not have precise figures on the number of people who have returned from the US over the past year, but anecdotal evidence suggests Gutemberg and his family are far from being alone. For local politicians, the issue has become a preoccupation.
“Are we prepared to receive these people back? This is a question we’re asking ourselves. We don’t have jobs for everyone,” says Lierte Junior, the city councillor.
Valadares has been quite good at attracting investment, but a recent decision by a major Brazilian pulp manufacturer to postpone its plans to create 15,000 jobs at a new plant in the city was a severe setback. “I think Valadares will suffer from the return of the people from the US in the next five years,” Junior remarks.
With funding from the Bank of Brazil and Western Union – two big beneficiaries of the flow of dollars into Valadares – a support group in the city has begun organising reintegration courses for returning emigrants. So far, more than 400 people have taken classes in alternative medicine, sewing and handcrafts, with a view to setting up their own small businesses.
“It’s about helping people to re-start their lives here,” says Maria dos Dores, one of the project’s organisers. “We’re also trying to help the families who are left here, because the sons and fathers they have abroad don’t have the money to send back any more.”
Past experience suggests further problems await those who return. According to research carried out at Univale, a local university, in 2006, 70 per cent of those who returned to Valadares to start their own business ended up losing their investment. But because the successful minority were “extremely visible” in the city, suggests Sueli Siqiuera, a sociologist at Univale, still more young people were encouraged to depart. And so the cycle repeated itself.
“Emigration brought about an improvement in the lives of some of those who left, but for others it meant only the frustration of years lost in a hard job chasing the dream of ‘making it’ in America,” she adds.
And while the recession has brought new problems, old ones linked to high emigration persist. Siqiuera remarks that many of the city’s children have never met their parents. The divorce rate is high, civic participation low, and dollar-driven rises in the cost of living have compounded the hardship of those who couldn’t afford to send sons and daughters abroad.
Coping with the return of emigrants might pose a challenge, but far greater are the problems caused by the collapse in remittances. Tax receipts have plummeted, clothes shops and car dealerships have closed their doors and a pall of despondency hangs over to the city. Even the precious stones cannot be relied on: this year, the city’s annual international gem fair was cancelled for the first time.
“The remittances have fallen a lot,” says Edmilson Soares, president of the local chamber of commerce. “Before, the city would receive about $1,000 per emigrant in the US per month. There were 50,000 of them in the US until recently, so that meant $50 million – that’s one third of the city budget.” Overall, he estimates, remittances have halved since October 2007.
MOST OF THEValadarenses in the US entered the country illegally – either by crossing the Mexican border or paying thousands of dollars for false documents – and the shadow travel industry such demand created has naturally fallen victim to the downturn as well. The trade in fake passports and visas has slowed, and many of those who worked as smugglers (or "consuls", as they are known in Valadares) bringing would-be emigrants to the Mexican border (where they would be handed over to the notorious "coyotes" for the final leg of the trip) have been put out of business. When The Irish Times approached one of the "consuls", he declined to speak; he was busy at work in his new bakery.
But can Governador Valadares, and so many other remittance-dependent communities across the developing world, reconcile itself with the collapse of old certainties with the same ease? Lierte Junior, the poll-topping city councillor, is bullish about the city’s prospects for recovery, but admits it will require a break with the city’s long-cultivated “addiction” to the dollar and its replacement with what he calls an “education economy”. “The dollar cycle is coming to an end,” he says. “The dollars are not coming to Valadares any more. What is coming back are the people . . . Now, the city needs to rethink its future.”
Twice a week, a bus departs from Valadares brimming with would-be emigrants taking the long journey south to the US consulate in Rio de Janeiro in the hope of securing a tourist visa. For nearly every one the trip is in vain: their city’s reputation precedes them, and even prominent politicians such as Lierte Junior routinely have their applications rejected.
With the illegal Mexican crossing having become more difficult and more dangerous, some “consuls” now charge up to $25,000 to smuggle Valadarenses across. And yet for every returning emigrant, there are many more who, unconvinced by the stories of hardship from the north, “still believe that it’s heaven there,” as Junior remarks, shaking his head.
Even Gutemberg Grobério, struggling to adapt to a frugal life back home after the trauma of seeing his family’s dream fulfilled and then disintegrate, admits that the temptation to try it all again will never pass. “If things get worse over here,” he says, “of course I’ll think of going back.”
Migration Nations
POLISH CARPENTERSin Ireland, Mexican factory workers in the US, Congolese lawyers in France. Across the developed world, immigrants are feeling some of the worst effects of the economic crisis. Losing their jobs faster than native workers and facing more restrictions on admission and residence, some have decided to return home and those who remain are sending less money back to their families. Many more are deciding not to emigrate in the first place.
Experts differ on whether this could lead to the biggest turnaround in global migration trends since the 1930s, but few predicted such dramatic upheaval.
In a report published this week, the World Bank forecast that remittances (money sent home by migrants) to developing countries will fall by 7.3 per cent this year, an unprecedented decline after annual growth of 15-20 per cent for decades.
These flows play a vital role in reducing poverty (in 2008 they amounted to $328 billion, a multiple of development aid), and the communities that depend on them have been suffering. In Tajikistan, Moldova and Lesotho, they account for more than a quarter of GDP. The World Bank has even remarked on the phenomenon of "reverse remittances" - migrants dipping into their savings back home or asking their families for financial help.
"These are remarkable, extraordinary figures," says one international expert.
While illegal immigration has proved most sensitive to the changing economic climate - net irregular migration into the US has been stagnant for the past two years, for example - figures for new arrivals have fallen among nearly all categories of migrants.
Less is known about how many people are going home, however. While many countries report rising numbers of returnees, the overall figures don't suggest an exodus. Most, it seems, are opting to stay put and wait for the storm to pass.
The Changing Face Of Migration
This is the first in a three-part series on the impact of the economic downturn on global migration
Monday:Spain is now offering immigrants cash incentives to return home. Will it work, and will other governments follow suit?
Tuesday:With anti-immigrant parties gaining ground in Europe and governments, Ireland's included, tightening the rules for admission, will the current crisis have a lasting impact on migration flows?
