The death of the American-Brazilian dream
A successful immigrant reports how Boston's economy affects its Brazilian population.
By Ioannis Papadopoulos
Alvaro Lima came to the United States two decades ago chasing a dream.
Lima migrated to Boston 23 years ago with hopes of a successful career in community organizing. He made it and today he serves as the research director for the Boston Redevelopment Authority. But his position comes with a price: he gets to witness more and more fellow Brazilians give up and retreat to other states or their homeland because of Boston's ailing economy.
The "American dream" is dying, leaving Lima despairing that he can't share his success story with them.
"My generation grew up looking at the United States as an imperial beast," Lima said. "We could never imagine how much poverty exists today within the country. Some places look like the Third World. This is not what Brazilian immigrants are looking for."
Last year, about 9,000 out of 200,000 Brazilians left Boston, Lima estimated.. Their destination is unknown, because about 60 percent of them are undocumented. They might have gone to New Orleans or Atlanta to seek a job in the construction industry. A few might have returned home.
Like Lima, Ronaldo Campos has seen many Brazilians leave Boston. Campos was born in Rio de Janeiro. Today he lives in Woburn, Mass. and works the night shift in a hospital as an interpreter for Brazilian patients."We used to be eight Portuguese interpreters at the hospital and now we are four," he said. "All of those patients left. We used to see 25 persons a day and now we see about six. A lot of people left. Thousands of them."
What brought all these immigrants to Boston in the first place was a quest for a "better life," Lima said. "They were looking for a place with security, low crime and good schools. They hoped to a better future and believed that if you work hard you will progress."
Instead, in today's economic crisis, the immigrants step into a world that doesn't match their expectations. "They cannot pay for college and they are treated as criminals," Lima said. "They teach their kids to avoid the police because they are here illegally, and their children believe that their parents have done a crime. Their American dream is under attack today."
Lima said that he is "a special case of an immigrant." He grew up in a middle-class Brazilian family. His mother wrote books about culture and his father was a historian. Lima came to the United States for the first time with a student visa. After graduation, he extended his stay for a year, getting into an optional training program (OPT). Then he got a working visa for six more years and eventually a Green Card. In spite of being here for over two decades, Lima doesn't have American citizenship yet his two children were born in Boston and are American citizens.
The development of Lima's immigrant status has been slow but steady. Not quite the same as other Brazilian immigrants.
Lima said most Brazilians who live today in Massachusetts come here illegally. They pay up to $20,000 to smugglers to cross the borders and enter into the United States, their "Promised Land."
"They might be teachers in Brazil, but here they cannot do the same job," Lima said. "So they clean houses or wash dishes. For them it's OK. But for their kids who grow up here this is not a perception of the future."
The children of Brazilian immigrants grow up with the same dreams and hopes as their American peers. But, most of the times, their financial situation shortens their ambitions. Like a woman from Brazil -who asked to not be identified- who works as a housekeeper in Boston. She couldn't afford to pay for her son's tuition. He had to drop out of college and start working with her. Not quite the life he imagined.
"Kids like this one see that there is no way out of their parents' fate," Lima said. "You cannot have a second generation of immigrants cleaning houses and be happy with it. They have different dreams, dreams that are shattered by the economy today."
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