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About Ken Rapoza Cruz
Expertise
I can help would be travelers find places to go, help them decide whether or not they should book tour packages in their home country or wait til they arrive in Brazil, and other relevant info about the country and its travel amenities. General questions about Brazil and living in Brazil.
Experience
Ken Rapoza is a former contributing editor at International Living, a monthly magazine about travel and real estate. Rapoza has also given speeches about Brazil travel and real estate offerings at Int'l Living conferences in the US. He now covers Brazil for a major U.S. news agency in New York City. He lives in Sao Paulo.
Publications
International Living, The Boston Globe, The Sun Sentinel, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal and many others.
Education/Credentials
BA -- Antioch College
MFA -- Vermont College
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You are here: Experts > Cultures > South America for Visitors > Brazil > Relocation
Brazil - Relocation
Expert: Ken Rapoza Cruz - 10/19/2009
Question
Hello Ken,
We are a professional couple, he is an electrical engineer, she a university administrator. We have two young children ages 7 & 4. We have been considering moving to Brazil for some time now. However, regardless of areas that we have researched and people we have spoken to in the various areas, people can't get past the fact that we want to move from the U.S. to Brazil. Are we completely crazy? We don't think so. We see Brazil as having a stable economy and opportunity for people who have some savings and are college educated, both of us have master's degrees. The question is, where is the best place to move to that has warm beaches, not sweltering like Belem please,low crime, family friendly and access to solid education for our growing children.
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Lucrecia
Answer
Hi Lucrecia:
Didnt mean to sound classist and racist. Im mulatto, so... Just stating a fact. Racist is mostly mulatto and black. ANd the northeast is almost all very poor and uneducatad people, with around 90% of the population black. Even if you are Puff Daddy, youre not goign to want to live among them because it is very difficult. Unless you want to live like the Swiss Family Robinson. My sister in law did that for 8 loooong years and she has had enough of it. Her husband was a manager of one of the biggest resorts in brazil, located in Bahia. No infrastructure outside of the hotel. No schools. You haev rich white people, and poor blacks. Thats it. The rich whites live in Salvador and the poor blacks live everywhere else. So if you are not that rich white (or rich black) person, you are stuck dealing with extremely poor surroundings. My two nephews went to public schools where the kids didnt have shoes to wear to school. Now, if that is where you want to live to show your kids that most of the world goes without, so be it. Its your choice. Im just telling you like it is.
Rio is very beautiful, but it is also very dangerous. So unless you live in the burbs, you will be subject to the daily violence that is rio. most of it happens in the mountain slums. But all of that poverty trickles down to the neighborhoods youre going to want to live in as an electric engineer and univ admin couple with masters degreres, money in the bank and two kids: Botafogo, Ipanema, Copacabana. When I give advice, I dont consider a person's income and interests to be equal to mine. I make 55k a year. I have two kids. I want safety, cleanliness. I dont need a million dollar home and security guards.
Belem is a nice place to visit, but the job opportunities for you will be slim and like you said, it will be smoking hot.
Most foreigners live in Rio and Sao Paulo because it has more to offer foreign families who do need good education and safe, clean, areas for children.
Didnt mean to turn you off. Sorry about that.
Lets start with the basics first: getting you or both of youa job.
First of all, you should only move here if one of you have a job. If you leave the US to come here to work as immigrants, you will not find a job because you have no legal rights to employment here. And there are people with your electrical engineering qualifications and university background who can do the same thing; why would anyone go through the trouble of sponsorign you for a business visa? See what I mean? Your name sounds Portuguese, so if one of you is Brazilian, then the battle is mostly won. From the US, youcan start usign your Brazilian contacts to finda job here, or see if the company you work for has employment in Brazil. For example, maybe your husband workds for Seimens. Seimens has a company here called Chemtech, an outsourcing consultancy that works in the IT, petrochemical, and mining fields. Brazil's economy is growing faster than it is in the US, but that doesnt mean you can come here as immigrants and tap the market unless one of you has legal rights to work here because you are a Brazilian citizen, or are so rich that you can get an investors visa -- providing you plan to invest in Brazil (like manybe buy a few hundred acres of land for a million dollars. That's the reality part.
Where to live? First of all, if you have two AMerican kids aged 7 and 4 who do not speak Portuguese, they will struggle. You will have to deal with the fact that they dont understand a lick of what their teacher is tellign them to do. Some private schools (all Portuguese) might even reject your kids if they cannot understand simple orders in the foreign language. The public schools here will only accept legal residents, I believe, but even so...that's like sending your kids to Bronx High School.
My two are the same age, but they are bilingual and study at a private catholic school where instruction is done completely in Portuguese. Youcan put your kids in the English language schools, if you get accepted (probably) and if you have around $25,000 -- per kid -- to spend on getting them in. Thats the high end. Let me give you a 50% discount then: $25,000 for the two of them. Dollars. Not Brazilian reals.
If you want to live near warm beaches, your ownly choices for professional people who are not Indiana Jones or the Swiss Family Robinson is reallly Rio de Janeiro or -- a distant second -- Espirito Santo's capital city, Victoria. Rio has diverse industry and is home to Petrobras, a major oil company that is always hiring (will require legal permanent residence and passing of a written exam, usually; unless your hubby is an electrical engineer for Chevron and can come down here on a work visa for a year or two...that would be ideal). Victoria is more of an oil city. .Rio is more international and will have more for an American couple, including schools for your kids, like English langage Montessori schools, or the US and British embassy schools for the super rich and the kids of diplomats.
Anything nfurther north is for the Swiss Family Robinson only and NOT recommended. It is extremely poor. The beaches are beautiful. Some of the cities are beautiful, but it is a mix of Africa and India up there with a rich white (and some black) oligarchical majority. The people there are extremely slow. Schools there? Good luck. Service? Good luck. Sure there are jobs up there, but you would want to go there only if your company is sendign you there, then I can recommend places to live (as could they) and where to send your kids to school.
Belem? Unless you all really are the Swiss Family Robinson, a mosquito loving lumber jack or an Indian killin' cattle rustler, forget Belem.
Then there is Sao Paulo, a monster city that is much safer than Rio and about an hour and a half from beautiful beaches. Here you will fight traffic jams to go to the beach (if you own a car, otherwise its a R$400 cab ride round trip...if youre not stuck in traffic for 4 hours on a holiday weekend). The schools here are better, but for two kids who do not speak Portuguese, you will have to pay through the nose for an English education.
Those are the obstacles. If you are Brazilian, then you already won half the battle. If your kids can at least understand the language, but are not fluent, they will pick it up in a matter of 3 to 4 months so you can put them into private Portuguese language schools which will cost you around R$750 per student, for a good one. I would recommend Rio, or the outskirts of Rio, if you dont mind driving. Rio city is dangerous, but only if you are living in the favelas or dealing in narcotics. Or unlikely and get hit by a stray bullet in a police shoot out, which has happened, but very rare as those things happen in the slums only. If you dont mind being accosted by poor people all day on Copa and Ipanema beaches, then Rio is the place for you. If you want peace and quiet, then you will have to live in Barra de Tijuca, maybe Urca, or Niteroi. Then you will have to commute every day into the city. Maybe as much as an hour each way.
If you are not Brazilian, you have your work cut out for you and the only secure way here is for one of you to have your US jobs set you up with a job here for a year or two.
The other way is what I call the Swiss Family Robinson route...you pack it up, rent a house somewhere, and slum it for a year just for the experience. In this case, if you want beaches, I would choose Rio. It's easy in and easy out, and full of international people. If you want Indiana Jones, go to the northeast, but if you have never lived oversesas and in a Third World country, you and your family will have to have an adventurers spirit to survive the heat, the shitty infrastructure, and the backwards people up there. It's like the Louisiana Bayou, or the Tennessee Appalachians. Only way less educated if you can image that. Im talkig 18 year old hookers, kids who dont own shoes, and white masters of slave descendents who cannot even speak right and are happy with bread and rice and beans all day.
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