The Haitian Migrants Post-2010: The Possibility of Environmental Refugee Status

Abstract

This article aims to address the migration of Haitians to Brazil after the earthquake of 2010 and the possible grant of its environmental refugee status. Search it will be a dialogue of this new category called in relation to guardianship system and refugee protection at the international level according to the Convention of Refugees of 1951 and the Additional Protocol on the same subject in 1967. For this it will be examined in general aspects of the condition of international migrant and the most frequent situations of refugee migration in Latin America. It addresses the need to expand the legal concept of refugee in view of the new factual and social realities in the context of climate change. Finally the Haitian immigration will be studied in Brazil a migratory phenomenon that has been gaining momentum since January 2010 when the country was strongly shaken by an earthquake that killed approximately 300,000 (three hundred thousand) people and left another part of the population without any means of maintenance. Before long given the growth of migratory flows in Latin America will be checked if these migrants can be identified as environmental refugee. The refugees objective of this research is to present the problem in recognition of environmental refugees as a new category which lacks international legal recognition and draw attention to the difficulty that countries have in receiving migrants, through the case of Haitians in Brazil. Finally it was decided to build the work by the deductive method through literature review.