Russian-speaking migrants in Brazil in the 21st century: demographic profiles, insertion paths and migratory projects

Abstract

The current work presents a brief panorama of contemporary Russophone migration flows to Brazil. Based on the data of SISMIGRA (Brazilian system of migrant registration), available in the Interactive Bank developed by Observatory of Migration in São Paulo, and the corpus of 40 semi-structured interviews with Russophone migrants living in Brazil, the text seeks to trace the demographic profile of these migrants and the ways of their socioeconomic insertion. The notion of the “Russian-speaking social space” is mobilized in order to consider the heterogeneity of the profiles of post-Soviet migrants. Finally, we discuss the difficulties faced by migrants to obtain the formal instruction in Portuguese as a Foreign Language, with emphasis on the Celpe-Bras proficiency test as an obstacle to the acquisition of Brazilian citizenship, one of the central aims of the migration projects of Russophones in Brazil.