Brazil is increasingly becoming a destination for the world’s asylum seekers. Between 2015 and 2024, the country received over 454,000 asylum applications from people of 175 different nationalities. Over 82% came from Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Angolan nationals. The country recorded more than 68,000 new asylum requests in 2024 alone, marking a 16.3% increase compared to the previous year.
With more and more people arriving, it’s important to understand how refugees are – or are not – integrating into the country’s social and economic fabric. While legal recognition has expanded, the lived reality for many refugees remains shaped by precarity, informality, and exclusion.
Brazil’s approach to labour market integration in particular reveals deep contradictions between rights on paper and realities on the ground. This is not unique to refugees, however. This reality is also faced by historically marginalised citizens.
A brief history of Brazil’s (racialised) refugee policy
The trajectory of Brazil’s refugee policy reflects the country’s broader racialised political and economic projects, as well as its international alignments. In practice, this meant that it tried to only let in white people for most of the 20th century.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Brazil’s refugee policy prioritised the admission of European refugees, who were perceived as both culturally assimilable and economically beneficial, while actively discouraging the entry of Black African and Asian migrants. This preference was not driven by humanitarian commitments, but by a strategic desire to “whiten” and modernise the national population. Those admitted were expected to integrate into the labour force, particularly in rural colonisation projects and low-skilled urban sectors. Through this coordinated effort, Brazil received approximately 40,000 European refugees.
White resettlement was further encouraged by Cold War dynamics. Brazil welcomed European refugees fleeing communist regimes, who integrated into Brazil’s rapidly urbanising and industrialising economy. The Eurocentric stance was further entrenched through the security concerns of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). The state’s approach to forced migrants was marked by suspicion and repression, particularly towards political dissidents from neighbouring countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, whom they viewed as potential threats.
There was no public policy for refugee integration or employment support during this era. Refugees who did find work often did so informally, and their professional experiences were largely invisible to the state. In contrast to earlier eras, this period was marked by institutional neglect and socio-economic marginalisation for newly arriving refugees to Brazil.
The state’s failure to provide structured support contradicts its self-image as a humanitarian leader and leaves most refugees navigating the labour market alone
The transition to democracy in the mid-1980s marked a significant turning point in Brazil’s refugee policy. The 1988 Federal Constitution enshrined human rights and the principle of asylum in foreign policy. Brazil lifted its geographical restriction to the 1951 Refugee Convention in 1989, which had limited its commitments to supporting European refugees, enabling the recognition of refugees from any region. The transition culminated in the enactment of Law 9.474 in 1997, which established the first national framework for refugee protection and created the National Committee for Refugees (CONARE).
In the post-1997 period, Brazil gained visibility as a humanitarian actor and regional leader in refugee protection. CONARE’s operations gradually became more systematised, and Brazil began to accept refugees from across the world.
Brazil’s most recent significant milestone was the enactment of the new Migration Law (Law No. 13.445/2017). This recognises migration as a human right and guarantees immigrants, on equal terms with Brazilian nationals, the inviolable rights to life, liberty, security, and property. This law also introduced a temporary visa for humanitarian reception, which may be granted to stateless individuals or nationals of countries experiencing, among other conditions, severe human rights violations.
Legally welcomed, economically marginalised
Although Brazil’s legal frameworks formally guarantee refugees the right to work, access public services, and acquire legal status, the actual mechanisms for socioeconomic inclusion remain fragmented and largely ineffective.
Refugee labour market integration is mostly delegated to civil society organisations rather than being treated as a state responsibility. The result is a landscape in which most refugees experience underemployment, informal labour, and a profound mismatch between their skills and available opportunities. Access to employment services, professional certification, and even basic language instruction remains minimal. The state’s failure to provide structured support contradicts its self-image as a humanitarian leader and leaves most refugees navigating the labour market alone.
In the absence of coordinated public policy, many refugees are forced into informal and exploitative sectors such as street vending, domestic work, construction, agriculture, and the textile industry. These sectors are not only precarious but also dangerous. In 2023, over 2,000 workers were removed from degrading conditions in major wineries in Bento Gonçalves, Rio Grande do Sul – including 83 Venezuelan migrants subjected to physical punishment, long hours and poor living conditions. In São Paulo, where 72% of migrant and refugee exploitation cases in the state are concentrated, the textile sector in particular thrives on the labour of under-protected migrants and refugees, often operating in abusive, underground workshops.
Credential non-recognition further compounds this marginalisation. Many refugees arrive in Brazil with university degrees and professional experience, but are unable to validate their qualifications due to bureaucratic barriers and lack of institutional support. This results in downward occupational mobility. Black migrants in particular, especially from Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, face layered discrimination that deepens their exclusion from formal employment and reinforces patterns of racial inequality.
Black and brown Brazilians are both overrepresented in precarious labour and overwhelmingly targeted by lethal state force
Importantly, these forms of exploitation do not affect refugees and migrants alone. They mirror the long-standing conditions endured by poor Brazilian workers, especially those racialised as Black.
Despite decreasing in recent years, precarious and informal work remains central to the lives of millions of Brazilian workers. Domestic work, construction, street vending, and hospitality – all sectors with low wages and no formal labour protections – remain the backbone of Brazil’s labour market. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, in the last quarter of 2024 nearly 40 million Brazilians – or 38.6% of the employed population – were in informal employment, without access to basic labour rights such as paid leave, social security or severance.
Yet this informality is not equally distributed. Black and Brown (pardo) Brazilians are disproportionately affected, with informality rates reaching 41.9% for Black workers and 43.5% for Brown workers, compared to just 32.6% for white workers.
The labour market also reveals stark racial inequalities in unemployment and income. In the same period, the national unemployment rate was 6.2%, but 7.5% among Black people and 7% among Brown people. White Brazilians had an unemployment rate of just 4.9%. Income disparities are equally severe: on average, white workers earned 73% more than Black workers and 67% more than Brown workers.
These figures underscore what researchers have long argued: the Brazilian labour market is structured by strong, racialised hierarchies deeply rooted in Brazil’s post-abolition racial order.
Racialised violence targets citizens and migrants alike
After formally ending slavery in 1888, Brazil launched a state-sponsored whitening project that encouraged European immigration as a means of "civilising" and "improving" the nation’s racial composition. These European immigrants were settled primarily in the economically dominant southern and southeastern regions.
Meanwhile, the formerly enslaved and their descendants – alongside other marginalised groups such as poor white Northeastern internal migrants – were excluded from land ownership and social protections, relegated to the urban poor peripheries, and forced into the most precarious segments of the labour market. Today, both migrants and native-born workers racialised as Black continue to bear the brunt of these historical exclusions, revealing the enduring legacy of Brazil’s racialised labour regime.
This economic exclusion intersects with racialised violence in Brazil’s urban spaces, in which the state is a key actor. According to data from the Rede de Observatórios da Segurança (Security Observatory Network), over 4,000 people were killed by police in 2023. Where race data was available, nearly 88% of victims were Black and Brown poor Brazilians.
Across multiple states, poor young men from favelas and peripheries, mostly Black and Brown, are consistently treated as criminal threats by police forces. This normalised state violence parallels their economic marginalisation: Black and brown Brazilians are both overrepresented in precarious labour and overwhelmingly targeted by lethal state force. The same structures that deny them decent work also deny them the right to live safely.
The 2024 and 2025 killings of two Senegalese street vendors, Serigne Mourtalla Mbaye and Ngange Mbaye, during police operations in São Paulo parallels the broader reality of Brazil’s urban poor. They also reveal a labour market shaped not just by institutional neglect but by active hostility.
Under the guise of ‘public order’ and ‘security’, poor Brazilians as well as migrant and refugee street vendors in cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro face daily violence at the hands of municipal and state police, including harassment, physical aggression, and the seizure of their goods due to their informal status and lack of permits (which RioOnWatch unpacks further in a 10-minute video ‘Rio de Janeiro Street Vendors’ Battle for Rights: My Informal Work Matters!’).
In São Paulo city centre, where both Senegalese were killed, reports of abuse and violence against street vendors have increased in tandem with the expansion of Operação Delegada – a partnership between the São Paulo City Hall and the State government. The initiative allows off-duty military police officers to work paid extra hours in uniform, primarily supporting sub-municipal authorities in cracking down on informal street commerce.
While presented as a measure to reinforce urban order, the operation has been widely criticised for enabling police violence. According to the human rights organisation Centro Gaspar Garcia de Direitos Humanos, this intensified police presence has coincided with a sharp rise in denunciations of police abuse, particularly targeting Black and migrant vendors operating without permits.
No paradise for refugees
Despite legal advances such as Law 9.474/97 and the 2017 Migration Law, the disconnect between formal rights and lived experience persists. A rights-based approach to labour market inclusion must go beyond legal status. It must involve coordinated state policy to ensure access to language education, credential validation, anti-discrimination protections, and employment pathways that reflect migrants’ actual qualifications and needs.
If Brazil wishes to uphold its image as a welcoming nation committed to human rights, it must confront the realities of its labour market and the historical exclusions of marginalised groups. Refugees and migrants, just like Brazil’s own marginalised citizens, do not need symbolic inclusion. They need protection, recognition, and access to the material conditions to live with dignity. Any meaningful change must also recognise that hardships faced by refugees are not anomalies, but intensifications of what poor, Black and indigenous Brazilians have long endured: a labour market built on exclusion, violence, and exploitation.
Explore the series
- Disposable yet indispensable: refugees in the global economyAslı Salihoğlu and Cameron Thibos
- The search for self-reliance: refugees and the informal working poorEvan Easton-Calabria
- Ten years on, Venezuelans still face precarity in ColombiaIsabel Ruiz
- Displacement from Venezuela taught me that class has no bordersErick Moreno Superlano
- How Ukrainian refugees hit a glass ceiling working in PolandJan Bazyli Klakla
- Exploitation embedded in the business model of refugee supportGeorgina Ramsay
- Refugees caught in Jordan’s campaign against informal workSolenn Almajali, Katharina Grüneisl and Katharina Lenner
- Kurds increasingly deported after Japan closes ‘loophole’ lawChiaki Tsuchida
- Refugees in Brazil: Marginalised despite legal protectionsAngelo Martins Junior
- Brazil refugees: Forming collective resistance where policy fails
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