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Lucinda Fonseca (Lisbon University)

26 March 2015 @ 14:00

 

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Date:
26 March 2015
Time:
14:00
Event Category:

“Feedback in international migration: Brazilian and Ukrainian migration to Portugal”

abstract

After the remarkable migration inflows that occurred during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Brazilians and Ukrainians became the two largest foreign nationalities present in Portugal. Since then, there has been a stabilisation and a recent decline of the flow. While the economic crisis has created impetus to return or on-migrate, there have also been additional changes in the characteristics of both stock and flows, with demographic consolidation due to family reunification among Ukrainians and new student migrants from Brazil.

This paper, using empirical data gathered within a research project – THEMIS (Theorizing the Evolution of European Migration Systems) – funded by NORFACE, examines the role that feedback mechanisms have played in recent migration dynamics to Portugal. It is structured in four main parts. It starts by discussing the role of feedback mechanisms in the migration systems dynamics, followed by a short presentation of the methodology and the empirical data used in the research. The way and extent to which macro factors, specifically economic conditions in the context of the crisis, have generated feedback through actual social networks are analysed in the third section. The paper ends with a final discussion of the more relevant results stressing the similarities and differences between the way these feedback mechanisms operate in migration to Portugal originating in Brazil and Ukraine.