By Lincoln Ellis
April 2 2010
Most people outside of Brazil don’t realize that Sao Paulo is home to the largest concentration of diasporic Japanese outside of Japan. In researching areas of the law that affect Asian-Brazilians, I found out that one of the most important legal developments comes from Japan, not Brazil. Japan has opened up temporary migration visas for Japanese-Brazilians, in order to fill labor shortages in certain lower-wage industries. Most Japanese-Brazilians do not speak Japanese, so they are not necessarily more qualified than others who would seek to employment opportunities in Japan. Nevertheless, they have benefited from a race-conscious Japanese Law that prefers the Japanese Diaspora over other workers.
This in turn has raised interesting questions about the role of Brazilian law. According to Dr. Mosato Ninomiya, President of CIATE (Information Center for Workers Abroad, www.ciate.org.br), the Brazilian Congress is considering a law to require that labor brokers (emprenteiras) be licensed in order to combat fraud in this area. Another issue that one worker who had returned from Japan brought up was the need to protect returnees from employment discrimination. Brazilian employers tend to think that people who have worked abroad for higher wages are likely to leave their Brazilian employer whenever another opportunity abroad opens up. Another law that Asian-Brazilians have supported is the Amnesty Law passed in 2009, which legalized over 45,000 undocumented immigrants in the Country. There had not been an amnesty law since 1989.
As these examples show, laws that target certain racial groups more than others are common, but there is still a stigma around laws that explicitly name certain racial groups (even when those laws are benign). Overcoming this barrier is one of the areas that we will continue to blog about over the next few days.
