Brazilians (brasileiros in Portuguese, IPA: [bzilejus][4]) are all people born in Brazil.

A Brazilian
can be also a person born abroad to a Brazilian parent or a foreigner living in Brazil who acquired
Brazilian citizenship.
According to the Constitution of Brazil, a Brazilian citizen is:
Anyone born in Brazil, even if to foreign parents. However, if the
foreign parents were at the service of a foreign State (such as
foreign diplomats), the child is not Brazilian;
Anyone born abroad to a Brazilian parent, with registration of birth in a
Brazilian Embassy or Consulate. Also, a person born abroad to a
Brazilian parent who was not registered but who, after turning 18 years
old, went to live in Brazil;
[5]

A foreigner living in Brazil who applied for and was accepted as a
Brazilian citizen (naturalized Brazilian).
According to the Constitution, all people who hold Brazilian citizenship are
equal, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or religion.
A foreigner can apply for Brazilian citizenship after living for 4 (four)
uninterrupted years in Brazil and being able to speak Portuguese. A
native person from an official Portuguese language country
(Portugal, Angola,Mozambique, Cape Verde, So Tom and
Prncipe, Guinea Bissau and East Timor) can request the Brazilian
nationality after only 1 uninterrupted year living in Brazil. A foreign born
person who holds Brazilian citizenship has exactly the same rights and
duties of the Brazilian citizen by birth, but cannot occupy some special
public positions such as the Presidency of the Republic, Vice-presidency
of the Republic, Minister (Secretary) of Defense, Presidency (Speaker) of
the Senate, Presidency (Speaker) of the House of Representatives,
Officer of the Armed Forces and Diplomat.
[5]

The Portuguese prerogative[edit]
According to the Brazilian Constitution, the Portuguese people have a
special status in Brazil. Article 12, first paragraph of the Constitution,
grants to citizens of Portugal with permanent residence in Brazil "the
rights attached to Brazilians", excluded from the constitutional
prerogatives of Brazilian born. Requirements for the granting of equality
are:habitual residence (permanent), the age of majority and formulation of
request from theMinister of Justice.
In Brazil, the Portuguese may require equal treatment with regard to civil
rights; moreover, they may ask to be granted political rights granted to
Brazilians (except the rights exclusive to the Brazilian born). In the latter
case, this requires a minimum of three years of permanent residence.
The use of citizenship by non-Brazilian nationals (in this case,
Portuguese) is a rare exception to the principle that nationality is a sine
qua non for citizenship, granted to the Portuguese if with reciprocal
treatment for the Brazilians in Portugal due to the historic relationship
between the two countries.
Overview[edit]
Main article: Race in Brazil
See also: Colonial Brazil, Immigration to Brazil, Afro-Brazilian
history and History of the Jews in Brazil
Brazilians are mostly descendants of colonial settlers and post-
colonial immigrants, African slaves and Brazil's indigenous peoples. Along
with several other groups of immigrants who arrived in Brazil, from the
1820s well into the 1970s, most of the immigrants
werePortuguese, Italians, Spaniards and Germans, also with significantly
large numbers ofJapanese and Lebanese people.
[6]


The Brazilian people have several ethnic groups. First
row: White (Portuguese, German, Italian andLebanese, respectively)
and Japanese Brazilians. Second row: African, pardo (cafuzo, mulato andcaboclo,
respectively) and Native (Indian) Brazilians.

Main Brazilian ethnic groups.
When the Portuguese arrived in South America in the 16th century, Brazil
was inhabited by an estimated 2.4 millionAmerindians, of more than
hundreds of different tribes, who had been living there since
the Pleistocene. From 1500 until its independence in 1822, Brazil was
settled by some 724,000 Portuguese, mostly men.
[7]
Portugal remained
the only significant source of European immigrants to Brazil until the early
19th century. However under the rule of Dutch Brazil in the north-eastern
part of the country from 1630-1654, a smaller, but significant number of
Dutch settlers and soldiers (Dutch Brazilian) and some Jewsarrived, the
latter seeking religious freedom. They founded the first Synagogue in the
Americas, named Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue in the city of Recife. It is
estimated, that 80,000 Dutch entered Brazilin that period. At the end of
Dutch rule, most of the Dutch and Jews had been expelled by the
Portuguese, but a smaller number had fled to the interior of north-eastern
Brazil, had changed their names to Portuguese ones or had switched the
religion. Nevertheless many Dutch settlers had intermarried and therefore
miscigenated with the local population before. The Jews who were mostly
expelled took off to what was then named New Amsterdam, today, New
York City, founding the oldest Jewish congregation in the USA,
theCongregation Shearith Israel. Others converted to Christianity, they
were then known asNew Christians or Marranos who sometimes
practiced Crypto-Judaism. Even if the Jewish population under Dutch-
Brazil not surpassed a few thousand individuals, a much bigger number
of New-Christians, in the past simply known as Portuguese, and Romani
Peoplearrived in Colonial Brazil. They immigrated to Brazil or had been
deported by the Inquisition from mostly Portugal and also Spain. As a
result of the Atlantic slave trade, from the mid-16th century until 1855, an
estimated 4 million African slaves, from dozens of different countries,
were brought to Brazil. In 1808, the Portuguese court moved to Brazil and
opened its seaports to other nations. Then, other groups of immigrants
started to immigrate to the country.
From 1820 to 1975, 5,686,133 immigrants entered Brazil, the vast
majority of them Europeans. In this period
the Portuguese and Italians arrived in equal numbers, and numbered,
including the Spaniards, close to 70% of all immigrants. The rest was
composed mainly
of Germans, Japanese, Lebanese, Syrians, Poles, French and Ukrainians.
Dozens of other immigrant groups form sizable to larger groups in Brazil.
The port of Santos, So Paulo, widely known as the most important
entrance of immigrants in Brazil, received people from more than 60
different countries.
[6]

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) classify the
Brazilian population in five
categories: brancos (white), negros (black), pardos (brown or
mixed), amarelos(Asian/yellow) and ndios (Amerindian), based on skin
color or race. The last detailed census (PNAD) found Brazil to be made
up of c. 91 million white people (White Brazilian), 79 million multiracial
people (Pardo), 14.7 million black people (Afro-Brazilian), 2-4 million
Asian people (Asian Brazilian) and 817,900 indigenous (Amerindian)
people.
Nowadays, Brazil is home to the largest Portuguese (c. 40110
m.), Italian (c. 25-30 million), Lebanese (c. 5 m.) and Japanese (c. 1,5 m.)
diaspora and holds the biggest number of multiracial people (Pardo) in
the world. There are more people of Lebanese andPortuguese diaspora
living in Brazil than in their respective homelands. The German,Polish and
more interestingly, the Romani People
[citation needed]
diaspora, is the second
largest. The Syrian ranks, depending on the source, on first or second
place. The Spanishdiaspora ranks on third or fourth place.
[citation
needed]
Also, Brazil is home to the only still ancient Pomeranian speaking
(Pomeranian language) community in the world, the language is now
extinct.


Young Brazilians.
In the 2005 detailed census, for the first time in two decades, the number
of White Brazilians did not exceed 50% of the population. On the other
side, the number ofpardos (multiracial) people increased and all the
others remained almost the same. According to the IBGE, this trend is
mainly because of the revaluation of the identity of historically
discriminated ethnic groups.
The ethnic composition of Brazilians is not uniform across the country.
Due to its large influx of European immigrants in the 19th century,
the Southern Region has a large White majority, composing 79.6% of its
population.
[8]
The Northeastern Region, as a result of the large numbers
of African slaves working in the sugar caneengenhos, has a majority
of pardos and black peoples, respectively, 63.1% and 7.0%.
[9]
Northern
Brazil, largely covered by the Amazon Rainforest, is 71.5% pardo, due
toAmerindian ancestry.
[10]
Southeast (55% White, 35% Pardo, 8% Black,
1% Asian, 0,1% Amerindian) and Central-Western (50% White, 43%
Pardo, 5% Black, 1% Asian/Amerindian) Brazil have a more balanced
ratio among different racial groups.
In 2011, the country was home to 1.5 million foreign born people, more
than twice as of 2009. The numbers still could be higher, as there are
many undocumented people in Brazil as well. For both, the documented
and undocumented, most of the foreigners come
fromPortugal, Bolivia, China, Paraguay, Angola, Spain, Argentina, Japan a
nd the USA.
[11]
The major work visas concessions were granted for
citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom.
[12]

In 2010, Brazil is home to 4,251 refugees from 76 different nationalities.
The largest refugee ancestries
were Angolan (1688), Colombian (583), Congolese (402), Liberian(259),
and Iraqi (197).
[13]

Brazil is said to be the most miscegenated country in the world, as since
the country was discovered, intermarriage between races never has been
a problem. But many Brazilians can not trace back their real origin. It has
always been nothing unusual, that names which were difficult to
pronounce had been changed into easier Portuguese surnames, specially
within mixed-race Brazilians. Brazil is a true melting-pot of Europeans,
Asians, Africans and indigenous people, who either are in the single
group or a mixture of various different backgrounds and races.

Tomado de: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_people