Brazil’s Other Deforestation Threat Plus Benefits of Blue Collar Immigration

Deforestation progress in the Amazon offset by losses in the Cerrado. Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has nearly halved since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) took office in January 2023. Lula laid the groundwork by revoking anti-environmental measures set by his predecessor, designating huge new swaths of Brazil as protected territory, and hiring thousands to work in Brazil’s environmental enforcement agencies to implement these rules. He further stepped up monitoring and enforcement by bringing in federal police and military personnel to protect the environment, especially when taking on powerful economic groups, including illegal gold miners in the Amazon’s Yanomami indigenous territory. 

More worrisome now is the deforestation in the Cerrado, a tropical savanna roughly the size of Mexico. Home to 60 percent of Brazil’s agricultural production and 22 percent of global soy exports, deforestation spiked some 9 percent there over the past twelve months. The federal government tools are limited due to laxer environmental protection laws for Brazil’s savannas combined with stiff opposition from the country’s agribusiness lobby in Brazil’s Congress. And international pressure and rules focus much more on the Amazon than these plains. China, Brazil’s number one purchaser of agricultural products, lacks deforestation rules for importers, and the EU’s new Deforestation Regulation will only apply to just a quarter of the Cerrado’s exports. If these Cerrado forest losses continue to offset Amazon gains, they threaten Lula’s domestic plans to reduce deforestation and his global climate leadership aspirations.

Blue collar immigration’s fiscal and economic benefits. Last year, over three million people entered the United States—a level not seen in over two decades. Of these some 1.3 million were undocumented and roughly half have only a high school education or less. 

A raft of recent studies suggest these newcomers are good news for the U.S. economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this influx of new people is helping diminish the U.S. federal deficit: it will boost real GDP growth by nearly three percentage points over the next decade, adding almost $9 trillion to the U.S. economy. New blue collar migrants will contribute $1 trillion to federal revenues over the next ten years while receiving just $0.3 trillion in estimated federal benefits, as most are ineligible for all but child nutrition and emergency healthcare benefits due to their undocumented status. And their arrivals are revitalizing towns and cities, as they buy or rent houses, dine out at restaurants, and shop at local stores. This boom in local demand creates more local jobs. 

And, in contrast to much of the political rhetoric, new blue collar migrant workers in the labor force don’t come at the cost of native-born workers. Instead, careful analyses show that new blue collar workers often increase rather than depress wages for native born blue collar workers, as white collar worker positions to manage the newcomers expand.