“I’m giving up on Brazil”: shifting migration aspirations and capabilities in the face of simultaneous crises

Abstract

Based on the aspirations-capabilities framework, this paper analyses how the overlap of three shocks - a national socio-political crisis, an economic downturn, and a socio-environmental disaster - influenced households' international migration aspirations, decisions and strategies. The study uses a mixed methods approach, including a statistically representative survey and eighteen semi-structured interviews conducted with households with and without international migration experience in Governador Valadares, one of the main emigration hotspots in Brazil. It argues that, despite similar representations of international migration across socioeconomic strata, people’s aspirations and capabilities to migrate in the context of multidimensional crises vary across class positions. These external shocks shaped migration aspirations not only instrumentally, diminishing access to financial and natural resources, but also symbolically, through feelings of dismay. The working poor report living in a ‘permanent state of crisis’ and see migration as a tool for improving living conditions. For the lower middle classes, these crises have rendered visible the mismatch between their (augmented) expectations, built during the early 2000s era of optimism, and their effective chances of social mobility. Migration, therefore, appears as a solution for accessing services they could once afford. For the upper-middle classes, these crises represented a rupture, with migration now being considered as a way of maintaining their quality of life and class position.