Brazilian Foreign Policy for Immigrants and Refugees: New Concepts and Ethical Issues

In the last decades, Brazil has received about 2,1 million immigrants, according to the Federal Police. In this contingency, migration flows from Latin America, Caribbean and West African coast can be highlighted, represented respectively by Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Senegalese and Ghanaians.Thus, this paper will discuss the role of Brazilian Foreign Policy, as a legal tool to coordinate Brazil’s immigration agenda and it aims to present the possibilities of the practical application of public policies for immigrants and refugees in the country based on the ethical challenges encountered by the Brazilian State and by the immigrants themselves, vis-à-vis to the foregoing context. Also, the paper will also present a brief immigration overview of Brazil, as well as launching for debate the concept of Brazilian Foreign Policy for Migrants and Refugees and its ethical challenges and delimitations in the Brazilian migration governance.


Introduction
Human mobility has always been a subject of studies and debates in the most varied aspects of modern science. While anthropologists devote themselves to investigate transcontinental migration causes, demographers analyse their population aspects, sociologists face the issues between being a migrant and the host society, psychologists observe the impacts on the mental health from the act of migrate and political scientists, geographers and internationalists estimate the political, territorial and international repercussions of migration.
However, over the last three decades with the advent of the technical--scientific informational globalization (SANTOS, 2017), which allowed the free circulation of capital, goods and information itself, but placed obstacles to human mobility-free, the ethical aspect of international migration has appeared most frequently in the collective, media, political and academic debate.
The migrant crisis in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean, of the Rohingya people and, more recently of the Venezuelans, have drawn social attention to the ethical treatment of migrants through the state, governments, international organizations and, ultimately, the most important one, through the civil society itself.
In this context, Brazil, the country that has received the most part of immigrants in South America in the last two decades (UEBEL, 2017), has 82 not remained immune to discussions about the ethical parameters brought about by the migration of Latin Americans and Caribbean People and West Africans, the main groups of new immigrants, represented by Bolivians, Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Senegalese.It is also worth noting the intense migration flow of Syrians to Brazil in the last three decades, due to the Civil War that takes place in Syria. Despite this article addressing economic migration, we cannot forget the contingent of asylum seekers and Syrian refugees in Brazil in recent years, which also imply ethical issues.
With changes in governmental and political agendas, transfigured into a polarization from a Centre-left progressive camp to a Far-right nationalist policy, the country included in its political agenda the migration issue, including its ethical dimension.
With that being said, this paper, which is divided into two sections, in addition to this Introduction and Conclusion, will address, through a bibliographic, documental, exploratory and qualitative research methodology, the ethical challenges arising from the International Relations field for discussion of international migration in the plan of the Brazilian Foreign Policy for Immigrants and Refugees, object of the doctoral thesis of the author. Thus, the first section will discuss the theoretical issues, presenting a brief immigration panorama in Brazil, a summary of the Brazilian Foreign Policy for Migrants and Refugees -concept proposed by the author -, the ethical challenges and the contemporary International Relations, and finally, the government institutional agenda, which will also be discussed in the second section, as a practical application of the present research object.

Theoretical Questions
In order to shed light on the theoretical debate about the international migrations to Brazil in the last two decades, vis-à-vis the ethical dimensions, it will be presented in the following four subsections a synthesis about 1) Brazil's immigration overview; 2)The Brazilian Foreign Policy for Migrants and Refugees;3) Ethical Challenges and Contemporary International Relations; and 4) The governmental institutional agenda as a path to practical application. These questions will be confronted in the next section with the objective to provide ethical application of the research problem in discussion.

Brazil's Migration Overview
Brazil's social, economic and cultural formation is the result of a multiethnic migration and it permeates the whole history of the country, from the colonial period of Portuguese exploitation to the present day, when the thirty years of national re-democratization are celebrated.
In the early days of Portuguese colonial exploitation, the immigration to Brazil took place in an ordered way, first by the Portuguese themselves, followed by the Spanish, and later through colonial invasions of the Dutch in the Northeast and the French in the Southeast region, especially in Rio de Janeiro State. Added to these flows of European, the slavery of black Africans, considered by some authors a forced migration through the institutionalized trafficking by the Kingdom of Portugal itself and later by the Empire of Brazil, led to the formation of a mixed Brazilian society -including the indigenous peoples -, multi-ethnic and multicultural (HOLANDA, 2012).
The first ethical dilemmas of immigration in Brazil -which will be discussed later -arise in this context of colonialism, and will be aggravated after independence in 1822 and with the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889, when immigration of Germans, Italians, Spanish and Japanese becomes a Federal Government program, designed to incorporate this workforce into the South-eastern coffee economy and settlement of the South, Midwest and North borders regions of the country. That being said,Brazil's immigration profile today shows, according to the Federal Police data, the official migration authority, about 2,1 million immigrants in regular situation, besides others 500,000 undocumented migrants, according to the map in Figure 1, from Latin America and Caribbean, Western Europe, west coast of Africa and Southeast Asia.As mentioned in the introduction to this article, the immigration flow of the Syrians is also considerable, since they are the largest group of asylum seekers and refugees in the country who are from outside the continent.

Brazilian Foreign Policy for Migrants and Refugees
To understand how the international migrations to Brazil were motivated in the last two decades, it is necessary to discuss the role of the strategic insertion of the country in the migrants' countries of origin, that is, the reorientation of the Brazilian Foreign Policy towards the Latin America and Africa (HIRST; LIMA; PINHEIRO, 2010), namely, in this case, the countries of its west coast and the Luso-African states,called PALOP.
Starting from an "active and haughty" foreign policy agenda, a term coi- Exposed that, it is possible to state that the entire Brazilian governmental agenda abroad was supported by an ethical axis, that is, a humanitarian bias, but with a practical objective already mentioned and that, after all, has sought to raise Brazil to a position of equal weight with the other major global powers, such as the United States, Russia, and China, not necessarily those that most respected the international ethics especially in the field of migration, our subject of discussion. It is precisely from this strategic insertion and the specific programs mentioned before that was identified the first ethical issues involving migrants and the Brazilian State in our research: after all, these were projects developed by the Brazilian government to leverage its international projection, serving a purpose of launching the country as a global power, however, the repercussions brought a significant increase in immigration flows, absorbed at first by the job offer and, subsequently, rejected due to the worsening of political, economic and social crisis in Brazil from 2014 to 2019.
It is noteworthy, therefore, that the previously desired immigrant, became in a short period of time, what we call hyperdynamization of migrations, an unwanted social actor and bearer of all dissatisfactions of Brazilian society, which start realizing an increase in unemployment, social inequality and in civil-collective discouragement. Obviously, the new 2,1 million immigrants were not responsible for the Brazilian crisis, but they served as a speech for social dissatisfaction and a target of the Far-right political opposition, which was victorious in the 2018 elections.
That being said, it is notable to observe that the contemporary immigration in Brazil, as a result of a federal and state policy, that is, the Brazilian Foreign Policy itself, has become an object of political and electoral discussion. This objectification resulted in episodes of effective xenophobia and persecution of immigrants, as depicted in Figure 2, with an unprecedented anti-immigration march, something that raise questions towards the ethical treatment of migrations by the Brazilian state and its government and that will be discussed in the next subsection.

Ethical Challenges and Contemporary International Relations
In the field of International Relations, whether as a subarea of Political Science, or a process of interaction between the different international actors, the ethical dilemma has always been present, from the first schools of idealistic and realistic thought to contemporary, postmodern, critical and constructivist theories (SARFATI, 2005).
Regarding the international migration, the discussion arising from the decolonial and post-colonial and post-positivist theories has allowed the inclusion of the human mobility issue not only in the academic debates, but also in the work agenda of international organizations such as the United Nations itself and its specific agencies: United Nations High-Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Having said that, the issue of the governmental and therefore state treatment of migration has reached a relevant ethical step in the Internatio- These three international legal landmarks allowed the migration issue to be treated by the states and governments through an ethical-normative prism until then inexistent, which entails, in the addition to the agreed obligations, a link between the domestic policies and a range of issues, such as social security,labour rights, access to public education and universal mental health, gender equality treatment,family reunification, human trafficking combat and unaccompanied child migration, etc.
The reflexes resulting from the incorporation of these themes considered ethical are also linked, according to Sassen (2007), to other contemporary International Relations topics, such as neo-colonialism, the securitization of borders, the statelessness issue and the diplomatic relations between nation-states. This way, the author draws attention to what it is described as "linking mechanisms" between different agendas of a national government in light of the key actor that is the international immigrant.
Thus, it is possible to understand that the ethical challenges arising from international migrations are intertwined with the of the receiving state's own internal ethical demands, something that we will see later in the case of Brazil. After all, free and universal access to security, education, health, housing and welfare is a demand of both migrants and national citizens, so it is, as the name itself says, universal.
It is in the question of the universality of rights, guarantees and benefits where the main differentiators of the migration ethical questions are found, which are presented through xenophobia and its multiple aspects -social, institutional, governmental and media -, securitization of the borders, criminalization of migrations and the effervescence of nationalist, separatist and supremacist movements in both hemispheres. This is best represented when we analyse the main agendas of Far-right political parties in countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands, in the European case, and in the conservative party groups from countries formed by migrants, such as the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina.
To conclude this section, this paper resumes the work of Cardoso and Faletto(1979), who by mentioning the process of dependence and development in Latin America invoke the dual character of migration to Latin America countries: sometimes considering the immigrant as a labour force, useful, pioneering and formative of the nation-states, sometimes considering the migrant an undesirable individual, bearer of all the ills of the underdeveloped world and a threat of national and sovereignty security, the jobs of the national citizens and democracy itself, something that, we see as cyclical according to the economic momentum under analysis. In the case of Brazil, it will not be different. Brazil.The immigrant workforce in Brazil has in its dualities a dependence on the country's own performance in Latin America. The immigrant is not seen, at least nowadays, as a driving force for development, except in very exceptional scenarios, being characterized by other names, such as expatriates, for example.The interesting and shifting point, which we highlight here, is that these perceptions have come to be adopted even institutionally, reflecting, in one way or another, in Brazil's migration policy and in public policies that reach migrants and refugees.
1 Still at a time of great global tension due to the Cold War, migration flows from countries in the socialist bloc were perceived with caution by governments aligned with the United States, such as Brazil. In one of his chapters on West-East movements, Lowe (2005) discusses these issues. The second, more recent example, is the policies of racial equality promoted since the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995Cardoso ( -2002 which deal with a variety of themes that aim to include Afro-Brazilians in the Brazilian society, especially in the higher education, in the labour market and in the public service, and the culmination of which was the Special i.e., the cultural approximation, traditions, rights and guarantees between national citizens and the newly arrived foreigners .

However, it was only after 37 years of validity that the Foreigners
It is possible to find scenarios in which social aggregation promoted by a national migration policy or agenda has led to successes, such as Canada, in the Northern Hemisphere, and Uruguay itself, Brazil's border neighbour, where an advanced approach is underway, among immigrants -many are from the same groups that migrated to Brazil in the last two decades -and the national society.
In In addition, it is necessary to draw attention to one of the main ethical challenges, which could turn into a possibility of social aggregation in the future, which is the press's approach to immigrants and refugees, commonly portrayed through media sensationalism and in inappropriate language, as if they were illegal or clandestine individuals. In recent years, the Brazilian press has given much attention to the migration flows, however, with a ba- Just as the countries of the Northern Hemisphere faced the migration issue, either through crisis or through readjustment of national or regional legislation (as in the case of European Union), Brazil today faces the same issue, however, with a high burden of ethical dimensions and which is supported by the wishes of the civil society and the blocs of which is part such as MERCOSUR and the Organization of the American States.
As innovative points of this research, we highlight the role assumed both by the Brazilian government, and by its specific structure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during the analysed period, as protagonists in the elaboration of immigration and refuge agendas. Until then, these issues always appeared fragmented in different governmental and political structures.
In summary, for the Brazilian State to address the international immigration topic in the country, with an ethical bias, in addition to putting into effect the new 2017 Immigration Law, it will be necessary a process of reconstruction of interrupted agendas in recent years and linked to reorientation of speeches and practices of government agencies, the press and the so-