European immigration to Brazil
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| Total population | |||||||||||||||||||||
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91,051,646 47.73% of Brazilians are of full European descent |
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| Regions with significant populations | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Entire country; highest percents found in southern and southeastern Brazil | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Languages | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Portuguese minorities speak assorted German dialects, mainly Riograndenser Hunsrückisch, Talian and Polish. Other smaller minorities include Ukrainian, Dutch, Lithuanian, Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. |
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| Religion | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Non-religious, Agnosticism, Atheism, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormonism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, Buddhism and Japanese new religions. | |||||||||||||||||||||
European immigration to Brazil refers to the movement of European people to Brazil. It should not be confused with the colonisation of the country by the Portuguese.
Maria Stella Ferreira Levy suggests the following periodisation of the process of immigration to Brazil:
During the first two of these periods, immigration to Brazil was almost exclusively of European origin, and it remained majoritarily so during all four of them, in spite of the increasing importance of Japanese immigration.
Immigration properly started with the opening of the Brazilian ports, in 1808. The government began to stimulate the arrival of Europeans to occupy plots of land and become small farmers. After independence from Portugal, the Brazilian Empire focused on the occupation of the provinces of Southern Brazil. From 1824, immigrants from Central Europe started to populate what is nowadays the region of São Leopoldo, in the province of Rio Grande do Sul. Immigration stalled in 1830, due to legislation forbidding government spending with the settlement of immigrants. Besides, Rio Grande do Sul, the main target of immigration, was convulsed with civil war from 1835 to 1845.
Between 1820 and 1876, 350,117 immigrants entered Brazil. Of these, 45.73% were Portuguese, 35.74% of "other nationalities," 12.97% Germans, while Italians and Spanish together did not reach 6%. The total number of immigrants per year averaged 6,000. Portuguese immigrants generally demanded the cities as established in commerce and peddling; others, particularly the Germans, were brought to settle in rural communities as small landowners. They received land, seed, livestock and other items to develop.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, the entry of immigrants in Brazil grew strongly. On one hand, Europe underwent a serious demographic crisis, which resulted in increased immigration; on the other hand, the final crisis of Brazilian slavery prompted Brazilian authorities to find solutions for the problem of work force. Consequently, while immigration until 1876 was focused on establishing communities of landowners, during this period, while this older process continued, immigrants were more and more attracted to the coffee plantations of São Paulo, where they became employees or were allowed to cultivate small tracts of land in exchange for their work in the coffee crop.
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Wikipedia