Brazilian Migration Policy and Climate Change

Abstract

This article examines the intersection between Brazilian migration policy, colonial legacies, and contemporary climate displacement, arguing that Brazil’s evolving legal framework offers a significant — though still incomplete — model for addressing the “normative vacuum” that characterises global governance of climate-induced migration. The goal of the study is threefold: to trace the colonial structures embedded in Brazilian migration history through a decolonial theoretical lens; to analyse the legal innovations introduced by the 2017 Migration Law (Law No. 13,445/2017) and the regulatory Decree No. 12,657/2025; and to assess the cultural dimensions of climate displacement as anticipated by Brazilian literature and visual arts. The methodology employed is interdisciplinary, combining bibliographic and documentary research with decolonial theory (Quijano, 2005; Krenak, 2019), international law analysis (Gemenne, 2015; Ramos, 2015), and cultural studies drawing on canonical works of Brazilian literature and art. The study finds that: (i) Brazilian migration history is constitutively shaped by colonial power structures — the forced African diaspora, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the racialised management of European immigration — which continue to inform contemporary exclusion patterns; (ii) the 2017 Migration Law represents a paradigmatic rupture with the national security model, reconstituting migration as a fundamental human right aligned with SDG 10.7 of the 2030 Agenda; (iii) Brazil’s humanitarian visa mechanism, pioneered in response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake, constitutes a concrete domestic response to the normative vacuum left by the 1951 Geneva Convention regarding environmentally displaced persons; and (iv) Brazilian literary and artistic works — from Graciliano Ramos’s Barren Lives to Portinari’s The Migrants — anticipated the social tragedy of climate displacement decades before the emergence of international climate governance. The implications of these findings suggest that the Global South, far from being a passive recipient of international norms, is producing innovative legal and cultural responses to climate migration that deserve recognition in global governance forums.