America the Irresistible
Conditions at Home Improve, but Foreigners Still Want to Come Here

By Joel Millman
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Over the decades, the search for economic opportunity has led millions of foreigners to leave their homelands and seek better fortunes in America, legally or illegally. But if economic conditions improved in other countries, wouldn't these foreigners be more tempted to stay home?

The U.S. has long believed that they would, and that assumption has been the basis for some of Washington's free-trade policies that aim to spread economic growth throughout Latin America.

The reality, however, is the very opposite. Economic and social trends in Latin America, including improved growth and liberalized trade and travel among its nations, are actually creating new incentives and opportunities for would-be migrants to head for the U.S. One group in particular embodies the new challenge facing the U.S.: Brazilians sneaking across the U.S.-Mexican border.

'It's a Paradox'

'They're the fastest-growing category we have of OTMs," says Mario Villarreal, chief spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection unit, referring to his agency's label for "other than Mexican" border-crossers. In the fiscal year that ended in September, law-enforcement agents arrested more than 8,600 Brazilian nationals crossing the border, up from 1,200 four years ago. This year the Border Patrol is on track to apprehend nearly 20,000 Brazilian migrants.

The problem of U.S.-bound Brazilians is notable for several reasons. For one, it is a reminder that neither distance nor difficulty deters determined migrants. A second, bigger lesson may be that economic prosperity abroad won't be as much of a solution as many policy makers have hoped. Indeed, the numbers of immigrants from Brazil have risen as its economy has improved; that suggests migration trends from South America will copy those established by Mexico and Central America, whose laborers respond as much to conditions in the U.S. economy as they do to those at home.

"It's a paradox we're just beginning to notice," says Jeffrey Davidow, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who now heads the Institute of the Americas at the University of California at San Diego. "The notion that migration is simply a question of poverty's push is simplistic. There are just as many pull factors: work opportunity, growing communities of countrymen abroad, skills that are in demand and transportable. These factors favor the middle class as well as the poor."

It is part of a global pattern, says Hania Zlotnick of the United Nations Population Division, who sees integration among economies, not poverty, as the driving force behind the flow of people across borders. Free trade, often described as a factor in reducing illegal immigration, is more likely to be a stimulant. "Development is what drives migration," she says, "not underdevelopment."

That theory seems valid in Brazil's case. U.S. border officials say illegal Brazilian immigration via Mexico took off in 2002, when Mexico ended its visa requirements for Brazilians. Both countries were liberalizing their trade rules with the rest of the world, and sought to increase the movement of goods and services between their economies, Latin America's two largest.

Illegal immigration from Brazil surged in 2003, when the country's economy fell into recession. Two years later, as the nation enjoyed a rebound, illegal immigration continued to escalate.

Brazilian officials say the overall pace of Brazilians moving abroad to work-legally and illegally-has quickened, with the number of Brazilian expatriates now approaching three million. Most of them head to Europe and Japan as "guest workers," but an estimated 800,000 Brazilian expatriates now are believed to be living in the U.S.

Traveling on Credit

With the economic pickup in Brazil, more poor Brazilians can afford to raise the capital required to migrate. Brazilians being held at the U.S. immigration prison in El Centro, Calif., say they can get to the U.S. border for as little as $1,500-the price of a cheap ticket to Mexico City and bus fare to the border. Others insist they can travel all the way to Boston for no money down; they don't have to pay until smugglers get them to their destination.

Edjalma Andrade de Oliveira, a 36-year-old cabdriver from Brazil, says he traveled on credit when he left home in November. He says he wanted to "maximize my work opportunities" and expected to land a job as a janitor once he reached the U.S.

Mr. Andrade, recounting experiences similar to those of seven others interviewed at El Centro, says he made all his arrangements through a travel agent in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a hub of immigration activity. He pledged his mother's house as collateral to get a $4,000 loan for the passage to Los Angeles. The agency bought him a ticket to Sao Paulo, Brazil, then to Mexico City, where he waited for a driver to contact him. He traveled by van to the U.S. frontier with two other migrants and arrived in the border town of Mexicali five days after leaving Brazil. After sleeping in a safe house near the border, he tried to cross with about a dozen others but was caught.

After little more than a month in the immigration jail, he was sent home-at U.S. taxpayer expense-one of more than 4,000 Brazilians sent back last year. As things turned out, his weeks on the road cost him nothing, not even the $4,000 he pledged in Brazil. "I don't have to pay anyone anything," he says, "because they never got me to L.A."