Student Ana Lais Scarpa was in line at the supermarket in Arzignano, a city of 25,000 in northern Italy, where she lives, when she heard something familiar. “There was a woman speaking Portuguese. I waited for her to finish and joked: ‘Wow, there are a lot of Brazilians here, right?!’ This has happened several times,” she says.
Ana moved in September last year to work as a nanny and file for Italian citizenship — her great-grandfather, on the other hand, emigrated from Italy to Brazil at the end of the 19th century.
The urge to make the change kicked in when the pandemic started. She decided that she no longer wanted to live in Belo Horizonte, where she was studying nutrition at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
The taste for traveling and discovering new cultures was added to the lack of perspective. “I was going to graduate, earn little, without much chance of growing,” says the 22-year-old student, who is now studying economics for free, as she is Italian and has a low income.
“What attracted me in Italy was the possibility of being here as a citizen, with all rights. And here there is a lot of opportunity and quality of life. There are also problems, but not like Brazil, where the situation is bad now. Everything is all right. very difficult, especially for those who are young.”
In Arzignano, she met several other Brazilians who also left Brazil for Italy. “Most of the foreigners here are Indians, but we joke that Brazilians are almost surpassing Indians,” says Ana. Her experience is reflected in official figures from the Brazilian government.
The most recent survey by Itamaraty shows that the size of the Brazilian community in Italy has almost doubled in two years, where President Jair Bolsonaro participates in a G20 meeting.
In 2018, 85.7 thousand Brazilians lived in the country and, in 2020, there were 161,000, an increase of 88%.
The numbers are an estimate by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that takes into account the records of Brazilian consulates, data from other national bodies, such as the Federal Revenue, and information from Italian authorities. In other words, in practice, the numbers can be even higher.
crisis and pandemic
It is true that this phenomenon is not restricted to Italy. Many people moved from Brazil during this period.
The number of Brazilians abroad rose from 3.59 million to 4.22 million, almost 18% more. Compared to 2015, when the uptrend started, the increase was 54% by 2020.
But Italy was one of the main destinations for recent Brazilian immigrants. In 2018, the country had the 11th largest Brazilian community in the world. In 2020, the sixth. The reports in the report of several professionals who work helping Brazilians in the immigration process also show this.
“I started to feel this increase between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 and, in 2020, it exploded and got even stronger this year”, says Anna Katarina Vieira, a lawyer specializing in citizenship processes.
She says that the economic crisis that Brazil is going through is one of the reasons. Many people lost their jobs and decided to try a new life abroad.
The pandemic and the restriction of entry in many countries imposed on Brazilians have also made many people come back to the citizenship process in order to have an alternative passport to travel. “But most of my clients are parents who want their children to have the opportunity to study in Europe.”
Attorney Ana Paula Dias Marques, specialized in immigration, also noticed a greater demand for her services. “I think it has to do with the pandemic and the crisis that the country is going through. When people see that the crisis will take a while to pass, that Brazil will take some time to recover, they try to start a life elsewhere” , he claims.
Brazilians will live in Italy to take citizenship
An advantage of Italy is that the granting of citizenship does not have a generational limit, such as Portugal, which only allows the benefit for even the grandchildren of Portuguese people.
For this reason, and also because there was a large immigration of Italians to Brazil in the past, many Brazilians are entitled to Italian citizenship and, after obtaining permission, can live in Italy. “Today, there are approximately 25 million descendants of Italians in Brazil”, explains Marques.
Bolsonaro himself is of Italian descent and should, when visiting cities in the country in the coming days, receive the title of honorary citizen of Anguillara Vêneta, birthplace of his family.
There are three main ways for a Brazilian descendant to become an Italian citizen. The first, through consulates in Brazil, where the queue for processes can take up to ten years.
Or file a lawsuit in Italian Court, claiming that consulates in Brazil do not respect the legal deadlines. The decision is usually favorable and comes out on average in two to three years. Or the quickest option: live in Italy and file the process at a local city hall. The smaller the city, the faster the process is usually. The wait takes an average of three to six months, but it can be shorter.
Two years ago, the consulate general of Brazil in Milan launched a booklet to guide those seeking advisory services in the citizenship process due to the “great increase in the number of Brazilian descendants who seek to have the nationality of their ancestors.” The idea is to prevent these people from falling into scams, which were becoming quite frequent, according to the consulate.
‘It’s a shame we didn’t come before’
Many people return to Brazil or move to other countries in Europe after obtaining citizenship. Many also go to settle in Italy.
Adriane Pignatti arrived, with her husband and two teenage daughters, in February of last year. They wanted to experience living abroad and give the girls the opportunity to study in another country.
They chose a very small city, Tuscany, with just over 8,000 inhabitants, in the central region of the country. In late July, she became an Italian citizen—she was the first in her family to go through this process. His great-grandparents were Italian. The plans were initially to live in the north of the country, but they were unable to move due to restrictions imposed by the government to contain the pandemic.
They then decided to settle in Viterbo, capital of the same province where they were and which is 1:30 am from Rome. “Here there are a lot of Brazilians,” she says.
Adriane was a civil servant and took an unpaid leave. Today, it provides services to Brazilians who want to become Italian citizens. Her husband is a chef and teaches gastronomy.
Just over a year and a half after moving, they are happy with the decision. “Here we earn little, but we live with dignity. It seems that the money earns more. The tax is high, but we have quality of life, good schools for free, health services that don’t cost an absurd amount like in Brazil”, says Adriane. “It’s a shame we didn’t come sooner.”
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