Brazil will restrict entry to some Asian nationals, aiming to curb migration to the US and Canada

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil will begin imposing restrictions on the entry of some foreigners from Asia who use the country as a launching point to migrate to the United States and Canada, the justice ministry’s press office said Wednesday.

The move, which starts on Monday, will affect migrants from Asian countries who require visas to remain in Brazil. It does not apply to people from Asian countries currently exempt from visas to Brazil. US citizens and many European nationals also do not require visas for Brazil.

A Federal Police investigation has shown these migrants often buy flights with layovers in Sao Paulo’s international airport, en route to other destinations, but stay in Brazil as a place from where they then begin their journey north, according to official documents provided to The Associated Press.

More than 70% of requests for refuge at the airport come from people with either Indian, Nepalese or Vietnamese nationalities, one of the documents says. The African nations of Somalia, Cameroon, Ghana and Ethiopia are among the remaining 30% of refuge seekers.

Starting next week, travelers without visas will either have to continue their journey by plane or return to their country of origin, the ministry said.

A report signed by federal police investigator Marinho da Silva Rezende Júnior informs the justice ministry that since the beginning of last year there has been “great turmoil” due to the influx of migrants at the airport in Guarulhos, a city located in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area.

“Evidence suggests that those migrants, for the most part, are making use of the known — and extremely dangerous — route that goes from Sao Paulo to the western state of Acre, so they can access Peru and go toward Central America and then, finally, reach the U.S. from its southern border,” one of the documents says.

An AP investigation in July found migrants passing through the Amazon, including some from Vietnam and India. Many returned to Acre state, on the border with Peru, as U.S. border policies triggered a wait-and-see attitude among them.

Brazil’s justice ministry said that the new guidelines will not apply to the almost 500 migrants currently staying camping out at a Sao Paulo’s international airport.

Rêmullo Diniz, the coordinator of Gefron, Acre state’s police group for border operations, told the AP the government’s move comes after local authorities spoke to U.S. diplomats about the situation with many Asian and undocumented migrants in the region.

“We have seen growth both in the number of migrants coming here and in the number of nations they come from,” Diniz told the AP over the phone. “Bangladesh, Indonesia also send a lot of people here. They come either with no documents or with fake documents from other nations.”

“That is a concern for us, they could be running from police,” he added. “And there are also the ‘coyote’ networks, taking unaccompanied children, trafficking drugs.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Brazil’s federal prosecutors’ office said in a statement that Sao Paulo’s international airport “is once again counting a high number of foreigners who arrive on flights of the airline LATAM and do not exit quickly due to the overload on the Brazilian migration system.”

The prosecutors’ office added that it will put pressure on airlines to give migrants some basic supplies as they wait for their concession of refuge. The term refers to an application for refugee status, regardless of the reason.

LATAM did not immediately respond an AP request for comment.

“It is important that we quickly decide on these refuge requests so that the growing arrival of foreigners does not impact the operation of the airport itself,” federal prosecutor Guilherme Rocha Göpfert said after a meeting at Sao Paulo’s international airport Wednesday.

One of the documents says Brazil’s federal police received 9,082 requests for refuge this year through July 15. That is more than the double the amount for the entire 2023, and the most in over a decade, according to the figures.

However, federal police said that just a few hundred of those sought to get documents to remain in Brazil.

The same document says federal police are convinced there is “a consolidated route of irregular migration in Brazil, with a strong presence of people who are involved in migrant smuggling and human trafficking, with an evident fraudulent use of the application for refugee status.”

Brazil has historically welcomed refugees, particularly Afghans in recent years, regardless of ideological leanings of the Latin American country’s leaders.

But reports of migrants seeking refugee status as a means to use Brazil as a waystation has caused frustration in the government, particularly at a time when the system is burdened by many people from Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine seeking humanitarian visas.

Brazil granted 11,248 humanitarian visas to Afghans alone between between Sept. 2021 and April 2024, government figures show.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva decided in January 2023, in the early days of his administration, to bring his country back to the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, an intergovernmental agreement.

His administration has kept humanitarian visas, but guidelines for the concession of those has become more restrictive under his administration.

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Associated Press writer Gabriela Sá Pessoa in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

Mauricio Savarese, The Associated Press