Trading Status for a Raise (original) (raw)

New York|Trading Status for a Raise

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/nyregion/trading-status-for-a-raise.html

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Dec. 26, 2005

Ricardo Stefano spends 11 hours a day, five days a week brushing the scuffed oxfords and dusty loafers of businessmen near Grand Central Terminal, something he has been doing since arriving from Brazil 15 years ago.

Shining shoes was a step down from fixing glasses in his father's eyeglass shop, particularly for someone with a year of college under his belt. But trailblazing compatriots told him he could make far more money shining shoes in New York than he could fixing glasses in Brazil, and the rumors turned out to be true. At age 43, he makes $500 a week, half of which he sends back to his estranged wife and three children in the state of Minas Gerais. He has not seen his children since he left. But Mr. Stefano does not regret his decision.

"When you come to this country, you know what kind of job you will find -- because you don't have language, you don't have papers," he said. "That's the price you pay."

Brazilian immigrants in the New York area are emerging as one of the city's faster growing ethnic groups, but unlike most Latin Americans who come here poor, ill-educated and willing to spirit across borders, Brazilians more often tend to come from a range of middle-class backgrounds, are well-schooled and can afford to fly here legally. Experts on these immigrants, like Maxine L. Margolis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, say that Brazilians qualify for tourist visas, which require proof of jobs and savings accounts, then often intentionally overstay them.

Once in the United States, even those with college degrees are willing to work as housekeepers, limousine drivers and go-go dancers because menial work in America pays much more than white-collar jobs do in the oft-troubled Brazilian economy.

"In Brazil you have quality of life, but here you have financial security," said Jamiel Ramalho de Almeida, a hairdresser who came from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state in southeastern Brazil, after graduating from the College of Philosophy, Science and Language with a teaching degree. Mr. Almeida, a neatly bearded man of flawless diction, owns the Ipanema Beauty Salon in Astoria, Queens. "When you get a taste of the good life, it's hard to go back to what you had before."

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