The immigration of racism – Leão Alves

The Foreigner Statute, on 1980, ended 160 years of racial engineering in Brazil. The Bill of the Migration Law, of the senator Aloysio Nunes, however, intends to resume the projects of those who have never been happy with the Brazilian Brazil.

At a time when the globalist tycoons paint reactions to disorderly immigration as racism and xenophobia manifestations, seeking to demoralize the resistance, it is important to register the Brazilian experience, which is similar of other countries of the Americas.

In Brazil, although not the sole motivation, to promote immigration has always been associated with racism against the local Mestizo population.

Imigrantismo on the 19th and 20th centuries was explicitly argued that it would be necessary to bring white immigrants to “improve the race” of Brazilian. The imigrantismo on the 21st century, however, adopts the multiculturalist style that conceal their racism under the banner of promoting diversity. In both, however, the goal is the same: avoid a Mestizo majority.

These two imigrantismos had the influence of two intellectuals who resided in Brazil, both averse to mestization: the French Arthur de Gobineau and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Gobineau, who lived in Brazil in the 19th century, as ambassador of France, was a friend of Emperor Peter II. He advocated the superiority of the Aryan race, which, according to him, would be doomed to extinction by miscigenation. His ideas influenced the Nazis and other racist movements.

In Brazil, this ideology provoked two main responses, both pro-imigrantismo. The historian Sílvio Romero argued that it would be necessary to amalgamate the whites to the fullest with the local Mestizo population, racially diluting this to form a white “adapted to the tropics.”

Another academic answer was of the physician Nina Rodrigues who, as Gobineau, did not believe that miscegenation could “improve the race”; he understood that immigration should serve to maintain a white elite to lead the country. Even made a proposal that resembles the current multiculturalism: argued that the application of the penalties take into account the racial formation of the defendant, should be more lenient when he believed, there was a greater propensity to racial violence.

Going against these two ideologies, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, early last century, argued that mestization was not the cause of Brazil’s problems, but beneficial: had served to unify the people and form the Brazilian Nation, preventing racial conflicts.

The immigrations, however, had already begun many years before them, on 1819, with Swiss, in the time of King John VI, shortly after Brazil no longer be a colony to become part of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. While slavery and the importation of Africans were retreating, the diversity and quantity of European immigrants was increasing.

While much would integrate and many of his descendants came even become nationalists, other encapsulate up hating the local people with the same spirit that had caused many European conflicts that made them come to Brazil. At that time also there was no indigenist concealment and racism was showed raw.

In the late 19th century, for example, a journal of the German colony, Der Urwaldsbote, of Blumenau, a city of the State of Santa Catarina, responded this way to the Patriotic League, an organization that criticized the violence of immigrants against the native Brazilians:

“The bugres hinder the colonization and communications between highlands and coast. We must end these disruption in totality and as soon as possible. Sentimental views which consider unjust and immoral the hunts moved to bugres are unwelcome.”

In 1872, the Brazilian census already indicated the increase of the white population, 38.1%, already equaling the pardo (brown) population.

On 1912, in the border of the States of Santa Catarina and Paraná, explodes the Contestado War. Among the reasons for the conflict, the privileges given to immigrant workers in relation to Brazilians, especially reaching the caboclos, the Mestizos of the region. The death toll in the conflict is uncertain; estimates range from 5,000 to 20,000 dead.

With the continuity of immigration, on 1940 whites comprised 63.5% and 21.2% the browns. At this time, the government of President Getulio Vargas promoted a nationalization policy which limited immigration, especially non-Portuguese, and sought to prevent the formation of racial and ethnic cysts.

The mestization was gradually increasing the population of browns and on 1980 the pardos made up 38.45% and 54.23% the whites, when it was sanctioned by President João Figueiredo the Foreigner Statute prepared during the presidency of his predecessor, Ernesto Geisel, whose father and four grandparents were German immigrants.

The trend to increased brown population continued to the present time, except in the 2000 census, on the second term of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, when there was a raise of percentage of whites and blacks and brown reduction, returning the increase of browns in the next censuses.

Gobineau left Brazil on 1870 not feeling or doing missing, but as little misfortune is foolishness, on 1935 showed up here a fan of him, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Replacing the discourse of supremacy of the race by the supremacy of diversity, Lévi-Strauss argued that diversity itself would be higher than the homogeneity and this would lead to decadence.

That is, mestization would lead to decadence.

Racism now had the rainbow way to promote racial segregation claiming to be protecting cultural and ethnic diversity. Among the Lévi-Strauss’s disciples stand up Florestan Fernandes. of the Workers’ Party (PT), and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB),  both sociologists at the University of São Paulo (USP), both constituents politicians, both indigenists and both advocates the imposition of Negro identity to Mestizos.

Lévi-Strauss is almost a sanctity in the Brazilian anthropological means and a reference to international organizations such as UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. His anti-Mestizo ideology gained power after the end of World War II and led to documents such as the Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

It’s in this climate of politically correct racism the senator Aloysio Nunes, of the PSDB, presented its Bill 288/2013 of the Migration Law, which aims to abolish the Foreigner Statute and throw open Brazil again for the architects of apartheid.

Leão Alves is former president of the Movimento Pardo-Mestiço Brasileiro – Nação Mestiça.