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In the world · Migration · 30 April 2026

OBMigra 2025: 2 million migrants live in Brazil

OBMigra's 2025 data count about 2 million migrants in Brazil, from 200 nationalities, and record formal jobs. What the numbers say.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Brazil today is home to about 2 million migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, from roughly 200 nationalities. The figure comes from the 12th Annual Report of the Observatory of International Migration (OBMigra), presented by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security on April 30, 2026, with 2025 data. The same study records a high: 78,400 formal jobs created for immigrants in a single year.

What happened

OBMigra is the observatory that brings together, in a single database, data from the Federal Police, Itamaraty (Brazil's foreign ministry), the Ministry of Labor, Conare (the National Committee for Refugees), IBGE (the national statistics institute) and the Central Bank. Each year it publishes two documents: the annual report, more analytical, and the leaner "Dados Consolidados da Imigração no Brasil" (Consolidated Immigration Data for Brazil). The two 2025 editions tell the same story with numbers that complement each other.

The main findings:

  • About 1.9 million active residence registrations at the end of 2025, most of them Venezuelans, Bolivians, Portuguese, Haitians and Argentines. Adding refugees and asylum seekers, the estimate slightly exceeds 2 million people.
  • 199,600 immigrants regularized by the Federal Police in 2025 alone.
  • 75,600 asylum applications, 10.9% more than in 2024. Cubans became the main nationality among applicants.
  • 13,140 naturalizations granted in the year, with Haitians in the lead.
  • About 410,000 immigrant workers with formal employment at year-end, according to the RAIS-CTPS-Caged database. Of the 78,400 jobs created for them in 2025, 66.3% were in the Southern states.
  • A US$2.5 billion balance in personal transfers, the second highest in the Central Bank's historical series.

The annual report adds the side that entry figures do not show: fewer than 5% of Brazilian municipalities have formal agreements to serve migrants, and only 1.4% offer services in another language. Enrollment of migrant students in basic education grew 437% between 2010 and 2024.

Why it matters

For decades, Brazil saw itself as a country of emigration, of people who left. The 2025 data show something else: the country receives, regularizes and employs a volume of immigrants that already carries weight in the economy of entire regions. In a meatpacking plant in Santa Catarina, a shop in São Paulo or a construction site in Paraná, the immigrant worker is no longer the exception.

OBMigra itself draws attention to the imbalance. The front door works, but the inner door, that of service in the newcomer's language, is still narrow. Those who cannot understand the form cannot exercise the right the law already guarantees.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez is one of these numbers. He was born in Colombia in 1982 and arrived in Brazil in 2002. In the story he tells, Brazil already existed inside him before he set foot in the country: since he was a boy he said he would live here, and capoeira was the bridge, as told in Capoeira was the bridge.

In his reading, behind each residence registration there is someone who crossed a border, a language and often a period of fear, and who decided to stay on their feet. For Bairo, the strongest figure in the report is not the total number of migrants. It is the number of jobs created: people who came to work and, more and more, to make work exist.

He often says the sun is for everyone, but shade, in the heat, is for few. For Bairo, the OBMigra numbers show both at once: a country that opens the door and does not yet offer enough shade to those who arrive. The chapter The sun is for everyone tells how he started over after arriving.

Where this meets the ecosystem

The bottleneck the report points to, information in the newcomer's language, is exactly the kind of problem Bairo wants to address with artificial intelligence agents. CLAIN, the agent orchestrator that created 1420mhz, proposes niche agents that explain rights, documents and regularization paths in Spanish, French, Haitian Creole or English, with the final decision always made by a person and a referral to the Public Defender's Office or the right public service.

In health, Xperienc Global Labs works on the Global Language proposal, in which patient and specialist each speak their own language, in a teleconsultation for a clinical second opinion, not a diagnostic report. For a migrant who has not yet mastered Portuguese, it is the difference between being heard and merely being served. These are proposals under development, not public services.

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