O caminho para as secas: as imigrações para o semiárido setentrional

Abstract

Brazilian Northeast region has historically had a massive process of emigration, which has been caused by semiarid rigorous droughts, tied to poor living conditions and low HDI. These are the factors that could explain this significant mobility pattern towards the South and Southeast of the country. However, the Northeast has been modifying its role in the national migration context. The region’s states have presented, in recent years, decreasing emigration rates and increasing immigration rates, which indicates new patterns of Brazilian migration flows through a greater importance of return migration. Taking into account that the new patterns of population distribution are dialectally correlated to the productive restructuring contexts in the Northeast, which have been undertaking different shapes lately, at the same time that we verify increasing return migration into the area, we look forward to analyzing the Northern Semiarid flows in order to identify and recognize the new roles of the cities in this region as spaces of population attraction in the Northeast, which has a singular migration dynamic and emerges as a locus of pull and turnover spaces that polarize the flows regionally. In this sense, the Northern Semiarid has had a migration attractiveness directly linked to the urbanization process that has taken place in the region, as well as to the boosting of shortdistance migration flows. In order to develop this research, we analyzed individual migrant characteristics that are singular in relation to what is commonly attributed to certain migrant typologies, such as direct migrants, return migrants and non-immigrant populations. This indicates that, despite the region general inequality context, the Northern Semiarid migrants hold better social indicators than the other traditional emigrants in the area. The increasing share of older and female migrant groups, as well as raising school enrollment rates, are elements that help us to understand this new migration context and the recent roles undertaken by migrants in a moment of increasing public policies’ investments in the Northern Semiarid.