BySimon Schwartzman. With 190 million inhabitants and about 592,000 foreign-born residents, Brazil is a relatively closed society, in spite of a long history of African slave trade until the mid-19th century and large inflows of Italian, German, Portuguese and Japanese immigrants until World War I. Today, most of the immigrants come from Portugal, Japan, Italy, Spain and border countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. About a fifth – 140,000 – have higher education degrees, coming mostly from Portugal, Italy, Argentina and Spain, according to data from the 2010 National Household Census. Brazil graduates about 12,000 doctoral students a year in its universities, up from 4,000 in 1998, and they go on to work mostly in the higher education sector and research (77%).
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