International Return Migration in Brazil: a new challenge?

The growth and stability of the Brazilian economy in the last two decades, combined with the recent crisis in Europe and in the United States, have increased the amount of international Brazilian return immigrants. This situation makes the question of the return of the Brazilians a demographic element which demands more attention from researchers. From this, the present article dialogues with some savants, who deal with the international migration studies, in order to substantiate the analysis of the return immigration to Brazil. Concomitantly, it describes the research instruments used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE) in 2000 and 2010 censuses to assess the population of Brazilian immigrants who returned (returnees), with the objective to identify the vulnerabilities and potentialities of those tools. From these observations, our aim is to compare the results of the 2000 and 2010 censuses related to the international return migration in order to verify the hypothesis about the increasing number of Brazilians who have returned.