Brazil Immigration Index 2026

The first thing the curve tells you is that 2020 was real. The Federal Police processed 92,749 registrations that year, less than half of 2019. Embassies stopped issuing visas, the Pacaraima border closed for months at a time, and reception centers ran skeleton crews. The interesting question is what happened next.

The recovery was not gradual. 2021 came in at 168,321 registrations — almost an 82% jump on the trough — and 2022 set a new all-time high at 243,675. By 2025, Brazil was processing 2.8 times as many registrations per year as it had during the pandemic. The Q1 2026 figure of 65,435 puts the year on pace for somewhere around 262,000 if the quarterly cadence holds, give or take ten percent.

Two things drove the speed of the bounce. First, the 2017 Migration Law gave the Federal Police a clearer set of legal categories to register people under, particularly humanitarian and family reunification pathways. Second, the post-2020 backlog hit the system at the same time as a fresh wave of arrivals. A Venezuelan who crossed Pacaraima in 2019 and a Cuban who arrived in 2024 can both show up in a 2022 batch of paperwork, and the data does not distinguish them. The 2022 peak above is partly real new arrivals, partly the system catching up on people it had already let in.

Two further details are worth noting. The 4.7% dip from 2022 to 2023 is genuine — Operação Acolhida processed fewer Venezuelans that year as the population already in Brazil stabilized — but it is not the start of a downtrend. 2024 and 2025 each added roughly 7% on top of the prior year. And nothing in the curve so far suggests Brazil is close to capacity in administrative terms. The Federal Police processed a quarter-million registrations in 2025 with mostly the same headcount it had in 2019.

Cuba's curve in this data is a useful test of every other claim in the report, because it is so steep that any explanation has to account for it precisely. The simplest version: a slow buildup from 2010 through 2020, mostly through Brazil's Mais Médicos program; then an abrupt acceleration after the July 2021 protests in Cuba; then a near-vertical climb in 2024 and 2025 as US and Mexican routes closed.

Mais Médicos brought in roughly 11,000 Cuban doctors between 2013 and 2018 under a now-defunct PAHO-mediated agreement, and a substantial fraction of them stayed in Brazil after the program ended. They show up in the early years of this dataset as a steady trickle of Cuban registrations, mostly in interior cities of Pernambuco, Maranhão, and Piauí where Mais Médicos was concentrated.

What changed after 2021 was the route. Direct Havana-São Paulo flights resumed, and Brazil at the time did not require Cubans to obtain a visa in advance — a quirk of bilateral travel agreements that has since been tightened. Cubans flew in on tourist permits and applied for residence after arrival, often using the humanitarian or "not applicable" amparo categories that the Federal Police had broad discretion over. By the time policymakers in Brasília noticed the pattern in 2023, more than 25,000 Cubans had already entered.

The 2024 and 2025 acceleration overlaps with closures further north. After the Biden administration's expansion of CBP One asylum pathways stalled in 2024 and the Trump administration's January 2025 border policy changes essentially shut humanitarian parole, Cubans who would have headed to the US-Mexico border looked for alternatives. Brazil — which still permits direct flights, has a pathway for humanitarian residence, and a large existing Cuban community to land into — became the alternative for tens of thousands.

The Cuban registrations in this dataset list NÃO APLICÁVEL as the amparo legal in roughly 70% of cases. That single category drove the entire reshuffling of Brazil's visa-category mix between 2022 and 2025: in 2019 it had 710 registrations across all nationalities; in 2025 it has 65,326, of which Cubans make up the majority. We do not yet know whether the Cuban inflow has peaked. Q1 2026 numbers will be the cleanest signal.

Three observations land hard once you stack the chart in percentage view. The Venezuelan Special Welcome program peaked at 40% of all registrations in 2022 and has fallen to 31% in 2025. The South American Mercosul agreements have grown steadily from 17% to 21%. And the residual NÃO APLICÁVEL bucket has gone from a rounding error to nearly a quarter of all registrations.

Work and investment visas, the category that most directly affects firms hiring foreign professionals, have grown 22% since 2019 in absolute terms but lost share in the mix because the humanitarian flows grew faster. The 2025 figure of 14,575 work-and-investment registrations is the highest on record in absolute terms. We dig into the country breakdown in the next section.

One pattern that doesn't show up in the bar chart but is worth pulling out: Family Reunification has grown faster than population growth alone would predict. From 17,807 registrations in 2019 to 22,570 in 2025, even after a dip in 2022. We read this as the second-order effect of the 2017-2022 humanitarian flows: people who arrived as primary applicants are now bringing spouses, parents, and children under the family-reunification visa pathway. If that pattern continues, the Family Reunification category will probably overtake Work and Investment by 2027.

China dominates Brazil's work-visa market in a way no other source country comes close to. 4,128 Chinese work-visa registrations in 2025, more than double the second-place country, and 161% growth since 2019. The Chinese cohort is concentrated in two industries: large infrastructure and energy projects (Belt and Road-adjacent investments in Brazilian ports, mining, and renewable energy), and the export-import logistics chain that now connects every Brazilian state to Chinese suppliers. Most of these visas are issued under the intracompany transfer category for firms operating subsidiaries in Brazil.

Bangladesh is the surprise. From 157 registrations in 2019 to 861 in 2025, Bangladesh's growth (+448%) signals an emerging migration corridor that did not exist a decade ago. Bangladeshi workers cluster in Brazilian textiles and small manufacturing, often via subcontracted recruitment networks linked to São Paulo's clothing industry. The same networks that brought Bolivians in the 1990s are reportedly now reaching further afield.

Traditional Western sources — USA, Italy, France, UK, Germany — hold roughly steady but do not grow. American work-visa registrations are flat at about 800 per year, French and Italian are below 700 each, and the UK is actually down from 2019. The shape of corporate immigration to Brazil has tilted toward Asia in a way that reflects investment flows: where capital has gone, the people have followed.

One detail that matters for foreign companies considering Brazil. Brazil's work-visa process is not particularly fast — six to twelve weeks for a straightforward CRNM type IV is normal — but it is rule-based and predictable. The Migration Law's autorização de residência framework gives the Ministry of Justice a clearer set of approval criteria than the older system, and the data here suggests the system is processing more cases per year with similar headcount. Refusals are rare for completed applications. The bottleneck for most firms is document preparation and notarization, not the Brazilian government's willingness to issue visas.

Boa Vista's number deserves a moment. The Roraima state capital had 35,014 immigrant registrations in 2025 — almost 90% of the entire state's total. That ratio is what reception infrastructure does to geographic distribution: Operação Acolhida is headquartered in Boa Vista, the federal triage center is in Boa Vista, and most Venezuelans crossing the Pacaraima border end up registered there before they are flown elsewhere. Pacaraima itself, the actual border town, registered 2,169 — a smaller number that mostly captures Venezuelans who chose to remain on the border.

São Paulo (the city) registered 38,523 immigrants in 2025, about 63% of the São Paulo state total. The remaining 37% are scattered across the metropolitan region (Guarulhos, São Bernardo, Osasco) and the state's interior — Campinas, Ribeirão Preto, São José dos Campos. The city of São Paulo absorbs more new immigrants per year than any city in South America, and probably more than any city in the Western Hemisphere outside the US-Mexico border zone.

What surprised us most in the city-level cut was the Santa Catarina cluster. Florianópolis (4,508), Chapecó (4,399), and Joinville (3,492) together register more immigrants than Rio de Janeiro. Chapecó in particular punches well above its weight because the meatpacking plants in the western part of the state have been actively recruiting Haitian and Venezuelan workers since 2014. The pattern is similar in Cascavel and Foz do Iguaçu in Paraná: small cities that anchor specific industries (agribusiness, hydroelectric, customs logistics) and have built their workforce around immigrant labor.

Curitiba's third-place ranking (12,861) is the most consequential ongoing trend. The city has grown into the second-largest immigration destination outside the border zone in just five years, driven by the Renault, Volvo, and Volkswagen industrial parks; the Federal University's research base; and a growing Venezuelan and Argentine community that has pulled others. Whatever Curitiba does for immigrants in the next five years will set the template for how secondary Brazilian cities absorb migration without São Paulo's existing infrastructure.

The southward shift is the single most important spatial trend in Brazilian immigration. In 2019, Roraima — population 600,000, two-thirds the size of Manaus — registered more immigrants than any other state by a wide margin, because every Venezuelan crossing Pacaraima had to register there. By 2025 Roraima had dropped to second place behind São Paulo, and the entire South region (Paraná +233%, Santa Catarina +227%, Rio Grande do Sul +78%) had quietly tripled its share.

What is moving people south is not asylum administration. It is the labor market. Operação Acolhida's interiorização program flies Venezuelans out of Roraima in batches, but most flights go to São Paulo, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Joinville, Manaus, and a rotation of about thirty other cities. The South receives them because that is where the jobs in meatpacking, construction, agriculture, and hospitality are. Roraima itself has limited absorptive capacity: the Boa Vista metropolitan area cannot productively employ another 30,000 working-age adults per year, so the system relocates them.

Two states under-perform their economic weight in this data. Bahia (Brazil's fourth most populous) registered only 1,800 immigrants in 2025; Pernambuco (sixth) about 2,400. The Northeast as a region absorbed 12% of new immigrants in 2025 despite holding 27% of Brazil's population. The reason is composition: most of the inflow is people seeking labor-market opportunity, and the Brazilian Northeast remains the country's lowest-wage region. Immigrants who can choose are choosing the South and Southeast.

Two states over-perform. Santa Catarina (population 7.6 million) registered 35,296 immigrants in 2025 — more than Rio de Janeiro (16.6 million) or Bahia (14.6 million). Mato Grosso (3.8 million) registered 6,375, which is more per capita than any state outside the border zone. Both are agricultural and food-processing economies that have spent the past decade actively recruiting foreign workers. The pattern points to where future immigration will go: not the marquee state capitals, but the secondary industrial cities that build their workforces around immigration.

Two categories at the top of the chart need a caveat. "Other / unclassified" (63,823) and "No occupation listed" (48,329) cover dependents, recently arrived adults still navigating the labor market, and the long tail of jobs that don't map cleanly to Brazilian occupational codes. Roughly 40% of all 2025 registrations land in these two buckets, which limits how much we can read from the data about what immigrants are actually doing.

Once you set those aside, the patterns are clear. Students (39,754) and minors (19,480) together represent the family side of immigration: people who arrive as the children of working-age principals, plus a substantial share of secondary education and university enrollment. Sales and shop work (13,022) is mostly small commerce in São Paulo, the Brás textile district especially. Domestic and homemaker (10,603) is overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly Bolivian and Haitian. Tailoring and textile work (10,029) is the legacy Bolivian sector still going strong.

The skilled professional categories are smaller but they are growing. Architects and engineers registered 2,745 immigrants in 2025, more than triple the 2019 figure. Teachers and professors registered 2,706 — driven by the post-pandemic expansion of international school networks in São Paulo, Rio, and the South. Liberal professionals and technicians (3,234) include lawyers, accountants, and consultants moving with international firms. The maritime category (3,193) is mostly Filipino, Indonesian, and Indian crew on ships registered in Brazilian ports — a niche the data captures because crew members on long stays must register with the Federal Police.

What does not show up in the data is as informative as what does. Information technology and software development is small — about 800 registrations in 2025 across all titles. That is a meaningful gap given Brazil's startup ecosystem and dollar-denominated tech salaries. Either Brazil is not yet competitive against US and European tech labor markets, or the software workers who move are using remote-work statuses that do not require Federal Police registration. The Brazilian "digital nomad" visa, introduced in 2022, has so far registered only a few hundred people per year. Most international tech workers in São Paulo and Florianópolis are working from Brazil under temporary stays that bypass this dataset entirely.

Of the 265,523 people who registered as immigrants in Brazil in 2025, only 68% had also entered the country in 2025. Another 13% had entered in 2024. The remaining 19% — about 50,000 people — were registering for paperwork on entries that happened anywhere from 2 to 14 years earlier.

That tail is meaningful for two reasons. First, it means our annual totals are not strict measures of migration flow. They are measures of administrative throughput. A spike in registrations one year may reflect a backlog clearing rather than fresh arrivals. The 2022 peak in Venezuelan registrations is a clear example: most of those people had been in Brazil since 2018 or 2019.

Second, the long-tail registrations — people regularizing decades-old presence — give us a small window into Brazil's undocumented population. Roughly 1,500 of the 2025 registrations involve entries from 2010 to 2014, the Haitian-wave years. Most of those are Haitians who had been working in Brazil for a decade and finally completed paperwork through the post-2017 humanitarian-residence pathway. There is a much larger undocumented population behind these visible regularizations — we estimate Brazil's total undocumented immigrant population at somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 — but SISMIGRA only sees the share that eventually surfaces.

For analytical purposes, the right way to read the headline numbers is this: roughly two-thirds of any year's registrations correspond to actual arrivals in that year. The remaining third is paperwork catching up to existing presence. When Brazilian immigration "grows 7%" year over year, the underlying flow of new arrivals is probably closer to flat or modestly up, with the rest of the growth representing the system processing more of its existing pipeline.

Brazil's immigrants are notably young. The 25-39 bracket alone accounts for 28% of all 2025 registrations, and adding the 15-24 bracket pushes the working-age share past 50%. Median age at registration in 2025 was 31, well below the median age of Brazil's population (37) and far below the median age of the European Union population (44). This is the demographic profile of an inflow driven by labor-market opportunity, not by family reunification or retirement.

The gender skew is real but smaller than common stereotypes suggest. Men outnumber women across every age bracket, but the ratio in 2025 is 1.27 to 1 overall — roughly 56% male, 44% female. The 25-39 working-age cohort runs slightly more male (1.33:1), and the 65+ cohort is essentially balanced. The ratio is most lopsided in the maritime and construction professions and most balanced in the service and care professions, which is consistent with how labor markets segment by gender in any country.

The 65+ category is small (7,250 in 2025, about 2.7% of total) but worth a note. Most retirement-age registrations are family reunification cases — elderly parents joining adult children who have already settled — rather than retiree visas in the sense familiar from Costa Rica or Portugal. Brazil offers a retirement-residence pathway through VITEM XIV, but the income threshold and tax treatment have not been competitive enough to draw a meaningful retiree flow.

The age structure has policy implications. A predominantly working-age inflow means immigrants in this dataset are net fiscal contributors, and given Brazil's own aging demographic curve (the country's median age is rising about a year every six), the pattern is at least directionally helpful. The Brazilian Ministry of Finance does not publish an explicit fiscal accounting of immigrant contributions, but the working-age share visible in this data is the kind of structure that, in the demographic literature on other countries, lines up with positive net contribution.

South America accounts for 63% of all registrations in 2025, a share roughly unchanged from 2019. Within that headline number, the composition has rotated meaningfully: Venezuelan registrations have fallen, while Bolivia, Argentina, and Colombia have all grown. The continent is producing fewer humanitarian-emergency arrivals and more steady-state Mercosul movement.

Africa's growth is the headline. From 5,945 registrations in 2019 to 13,575 in 2025 (+128%), African immigration to Brazil is on a clearly upward trajectory and has not yet plateaued. Angola accounts for the largest single share — Lusophone Africans naturally find Portuguese-speaking Brazil easier to navigate than the Anglophone alternatives — followed by Nigeria, Senegal, Cape Verde, and Ghana. Most African arrivals concentrate in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with smaller communities in Brasília and Salvador.

The Asia number understates one trend and overstates another. Chinese registrations (6,379 in 2025) are the visible top of an iceberg of corporate, investor, and intracompany migration that runs through complex legal structures. Bangladeshi and Indian numbers are smaller but growing faster than the headline suggests, often through textile and tech-services intermediaries. On the other side, the Asian total is inflated by long-resident Filipino and Japanese-Brazilian communities completing routine paperwork rather than fresh arrivals.

Europe is roughly flat. About 14,000 European registrations per year, no clear trend. Within Europe, Italian and Portuguese numbers are slowly declining as the post-2008 European-recession migration cohort completes its naturalization processes; Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian registrations have grown sharply since 2022 as Brazil opened humanitarian visa channels for war-affected populations. North America (mostly the US) and Oceania (mostly Australia) are small and stable.

The first thing to notice about Americans in Brazil is that they are not a generic professional class. The single largest declared profession among US nationals registering in 2025 is "clergy or member of a religious order" — 1,227 of 3,361 total, about 36%. American religious mission visas in Brazil are dominated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), which maintains a large network of full-time young missionaries across the country, plus Evangelical and Catholic missions. The 36% number is down from 42% in 2019, but it is still by far the largest single category.

The second pattern is the rise of professional and skilled-worker categories. American architects and engineers (132 in 2025), liberal professionals (141), teachers and professors (115), and corporate directors (105) are all visible in the top of the profession list. Programmers and IT analysts are smaller (72) but growing. Together these professional categories represent about 18% of US registrations, up from roughly 12% in 2019. The slow professionalization of US migration to Brazil is the most consistent multi-year trend in this country breakdown.

The third pattern is the family side. About 27% of US registrations in 2025 are family reunification visas, which is high for a developed-country source. A substantial share of those are returning Brazilian-American families: a Brazilian who emigrated to the United States in the 1980s or 1990s, raised children there with US citizenship, and is now bringing the household back to Brazil. Their US-citizen children show up in this dataset under family reunification rather than work or investment.

Retiree migration from the US is small but present (192 in 2025, mostly under VITEM XIV). Brazil has not been competitive against Costa Rica, Portugal, or Mexico for American retirees, mostly because the income threshold for the residence-by-financial-means pathway is higher and the Brazilian tax treatment of retirement income is less favorable than in those alternatives. We see the retiree number creeping up rather than surging.

For Americans considering a move, two practical points fall out of this dataset. First, work-visa numbers are stable at about 800 per year. Brazilian companies hire Americans regularly enough that the system is well-rehearsed, but it is not a high-volume route — Americans are 5% of all work-visa registrations in Brazil, far behind China, Bangladesh, or even the Philippines. Second, the family-reunification growth suggests a substantial Brazilian-American population in the US that is now starting to move back. If you are in that situation, the family route is materially faster and cheaper than a fresh work or investor visa.