Amid increasing immigration from Latin American countries to Brazil and the lowest unemployment rate in history, foreigners already account for 4% of hiring in Brazil’s formal labor market, and almost half of them come from Venezuela.
Data from Caged (General Register of Employees and Unemployed) show that between January and October 2025 alone, the balance between admissions and dismissals of people of other nationalities was positive at 73.4 thousand (compared to a total of 1.8 million new vacancies).
That’s more than the 71.1 thousand for all of last year, when foreigners also made up about 4% of formal jobs, and a 196.2% jump from 2020, when the Caged series began using the current methodology.
The main nationalities of those hired are Venezuelans (47.8% of the total number of foreigners admitted this year), Haitians (8.2% of the total), Argentines (4.8%) and Paraguayans (4.3%).
They represent a growing share of the formal labor market. In 2020, when the market as a whole shed jobs due to the pandemic, 24,800 people were hired; in 2021, this number fell to 5,200 thousand (or 0.19% of the total balance); in 2022, this number increased to 35.9 thousand (1.78% of the total) and in 2023, to 47.3 thousand (3.2%).
This movement is partly linked to the strong flow of immigration to Brazil between the last decade and the first half of this decade. From 2010 to 2025, 182.2 million foreigners entered Brazil through border crossings, while 184.2 million left the country. In other words, the balance was negative by more than 2 million during this period, according to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.
“In net terms, when there are more Brazilians leaving than foreigners entering, we lose labor. But on the other hand, we gain thanks to foreigners coming to Brazil,” explains Bruno Imaizumi, labor market economist at 4intelligence.
In addition to the greater availability of foreign labor, growth is inversely proportional to the fall in the unemployment rate. In 2021, unemployment was 12.1%; in 2022, 8.3%; in 2023, 7.6%; in 2024, 6.2%. In the quarter ended October this year, it was 5.4%, the lowest level in the historic series started in 2012, according to IBGE data.
“The main reason for the absorption of foreign labor is that the labor market is sufficiently hot,” Imaizumi points out.
He recalls that labor market turnover reached a record level in Brazil, reaching 36.1% of formal workers in the last 12 months ending in October. Before the pandemic, at the start of 2020, it was less than 25%.
Foreigners are hired mainly for vacant positions in segments where it is difficult to find employees, such as the position of production line driver, which leads to the hiring of those from outside the country (positive balance of 13.8 thousand until October).
A survey carried out by Fiesp (Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo) helps to explain it: 20.5% of industries in São Paulo that looked for new employees between the beginning of 2024 and March of this year failed to hire.
Among the vacancies most filled by foreigners are those of cleaners (5,300), butchers (4,700) and construction workers (4,100).
“There is a shortage of Brazilian labor for these and other functions,” emphasizes Hélio Zylberstajn, senior professor at the USP Faculty of Economics and coordinator of the Fipe (Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas) salary counter. “And for Latin American countries, Brazil has become a center of attraction.”
Data from the 2022 IBGE census shows that between 2010 and 2022, the number of Venezuelans arriving in Brazil increased from 2,900 to 271,500, amid worsening socio-economic difficulties in Venezuela during the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro.
This is the case of Venezuelan Maria Hernández, 32, who arrived in Brazil with her family in 2019 in the hope of offering better financial conditions to her daughter, who was then a little over a year old.
She got a job with a formal contract as a bilingual customer service analyst, in Portuguese and Spanish, at Foundever, a multinational company specializing in improving the consumer experience. Today, his role is that of training analyst.
A graduate in electrical engineering at the José Antonio Anzoátegui University, in the town of El Tigre, Maria became a physics professor in Venezuela. “I started working in the household, despite all my studies,” he says. “I have no plans to come back. I have been very well received here, my youngest daughter is Brazilian and the oldest has lived much longer in Brazil than in Venezuela.”
Caged data shows that most Venezuelans are hired in Brazil’s southern states. Between January and October, 25,900 people obtained formal employment in the region, especially in Santa Catarina, with 10,800 hired, followed by Paraná (9,300) and Rio Grande do Sul (5,600).
Venezuelan Julio César, 27, who has been working for six months as a valet at Ibis Budget, of the Accor chain, previously lived in Erechim (RS), where he worked for two years in a bus company, and in Cascavel (PR), where he worked for nine months in a chicken packaging factory.
For him, the biggest difficulty in adapting was the language. “I didn’t know what a cup was, what a napkin was, very simple things I had to learn,” he says. “When I lived in Venezuela, I didn’t have a permanent job, I always worked daily. Here, I was able to work for several months, I became more stable,” he comments.
Humanitarian crises, such as the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, also explain the increase in arrivals of foreigners on the labor market: the number of Haitians arriving in Brazil jumped by 106,294% in 12 years until 2022, according to the IBGE, going from 54 to 57,453.
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