Panorama Internacional FEE brings to the debate, in its third edition, the issue of international migration. The phenomenon of human migration has been recurrent in the evolutionary process of societies. Its dimensions, its causes and its effects lie in the fields of politics, economics, religion, the history of climate change, etc. The complexity of the issue is extremely important for the understanding of other historical, political, economic and social phenomena. How can one understand, for example, the formation of national states and their political and economic systems throughout history without taking into account the role of migration flows in the context of all these processes?
Given the complexity inherent to the dynamics of migration movements, assigning to these phenomena the label of “crisis” seems to be redundant considering that migrations represent a daily challenge for countries. Thus, one gets the impression that the potential crisis is inversely related to the ability of states to deal with the influx of foreigners in national territories. On the other hand, one has the perception that the causes are often related to the failure of states in providing the conditions for the permanence of its citizens in their homeland. Thus, taking into consideration that states’ public policies are increasingly conditioned to international investors’ positive expectations towards the management of their national public accounts, the adoption of immigration policies by countries has the challenge, among many others, to fit in the economic scope for a long time designed to the attraction of international capital flows.
At both extremes of this problem, home country and host country, the indisputable by-products of the capitalist system in which the world economy is inserted become evident: the losers and the winners. In this sense, it has been observed that the international division of labor, which long ago crystallized the role of each country in the global economic system, has been gradually reconfigured by the spreading of the production processes worldwide in what is conventionally called the global chains of value.
The core countries that have already achieved high levels of economic and social development for their people, often at the expense of plunder and colonialism of people in the global periphery (Asia, Latin America and Africa), seek to maintain the “conquered” social welfare. As for the peripheral countries, global holders of strategic raw materials, they follow, inertially at a slow pace, and in totally different conditions, the path traced by the leaders of global capitalism in order to also ensure some economic and social welfare to their nationals. Thus, this economic interdependence enhances the degrees of dependency and vulnerability among countries and strengthens transmission channels that enable, for example, the building of North-North, South-South and South-North migratory bridges.
In addressing the immigration issue in the international context, it is also common to give too much weight to wars or to the emergence of ethno-religious conflicts in order to understand the intensity and direction of migration flows. In other cases, extreme weather events (earthquakes, tsunamis, desertification of arable land, prolonged droughts, etc.) are seen as the driving force of great migrations. However, this issue requires a political analysis that sees these variables in a systemic approach that takes into account the complex inter-state disputes over power resources within the international system. In addition, and in a complementary fashion, this analysis should also take into consideration the contradictions of the capitalist system that are leveraged as the globalization process intensifies itself.
Last year, the challenge of the European Union facing the explosion in the number of international immigrants who got to the borders of its member countries has revived the debate on international migration flows. In 2015, many immigrants fleeing the conflicts in Syria and Africa sought asylum in European countries. The direct involvement of the United States and European powers in many of these conflicts has put them at the center of this debate as key players in addressing the refugee crisis.
In Brazil, this discussion had already been made by the federal authorities since 2010, when the country began to receive an influx of Haitian immigrants who left their country after the occurrence of a major earthquake that same year. With the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Brazil also began to receive Syrian refugees in national territory.
Both in Brazil and in Europe, the discussion on refugees sparked debates on the countries’ responsibility whether or not to receive these migrants. At the heart of the arguments lie the impacts of the migratory influx in job markets of host countries; the pressure of this migratory influx on the social welfare system of the host states; besides xenophobic issues such as the cultural and religious impact of foreigners over local societies.
In Rio Grande do Sul, a Brazilian state with large foreign influence in its cultural, economic and social formation (Portuguese, African slaves, Italian and German), the migration issue has gained prominence due the fact that the state has become an attraction pole for Haitian workforce that enters Brazil through the state of Acre. Besides the Haitians, it is common to find African migrants looking for jobs and income opportunities in Rio Grande do Sul.
Therefore, considering the complexity and the contemporaneity of this issue at the international, national and local contexts, Panorama International FEE brings this systemic look on the current scenario of international migration and its global interactions in the fields of economics and geopolitics, as well as on the role of Brazil with respect to this challenge. More than finding answers and providing solutions to this issue, this edition discusses the difficulties of this topic, which may be analyzed from various perspectives.
Researcher and economist Jaime Carrion Fialkow reviews, in the first text of the publication, the main processes relevant to international migration nowadays. Based on UN data agencies that deal with international migration, his text considers the main variables in each one of the migratory flows suggested in his search. In the second article, researchers in International Relations Ricardo Fagundes Leães and Bruno Mariotto Jubran analyze the central variable of the current refugee crisis in Europe: the civil war in Syria. Moving away from dichotomous approaches that seek to identify the forces of good and evil, the researchers shed light on the complex web of conflicting geopolitical interests that involve a wide range of international actors in the Middle East region. In the third work of this edition, economist and researcher Iracema Keila Castelo Branco looks at this issue from a national perspective, investigating the impact of the recent international migration flow of the last 5 years on the labor market in Brazil and in Rio Grande do Sul. In the fourth and last article, researcher and historian Álvaro Antonio Klafke analyzes the perception of the press over the discussions that involve migratory inflows in Rio Grande do Sul in three distinct historical moments.
Finally, Panorama Internacional FEE interviews International Relations Professor of the Undergraduate Program at the University of São Paulo Deisy Ventura. Based on her extensive research curriculum on international human migrations, Deisy Ventura exposes her impressions on this important international issue, analyzing the behavior of key international actors as well as Brazil’s attitude facing this challenge.
