9 - At the Doorstep of Mass Migrations

Summary

Amid epidemics, droughts, and a bourgeoning abolitionist wave in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian Empire internalized migration protocols long in the making. Crucial to the development of new migration policies was the Sociedade Central de Imigração (SCI), a new association midway between a corporation and a literary club. The SCI and its abolitionist members, which included conservative noblemen and republican professionals, synthesized the lessons learned by three generations of political elites, and avidly lobbied for reform policies pertinent to land surveying and distribution, naturalization, and immigration promotion. Dismissed by scholars as a bourgeois and largely failed experiment in immigration advocacy, the SCI in fact furnished the policy tools for the Brazilian government to counter German and Italian interdictions on migrations to Brazil, which, as the chapter demonstrates, had more to do with commercial and geostrategic concerns than with immigration issues themselves. Ultimately, the SCI laid the building blocks for the new Republican government to welcome exponentially growing cohorts of migrants despite the persistence of international prohibitions in Italy.