Simon Romero
New York Times News Service

BRASILEIA, Brazil – Of the odyssey that delivered him to this town in the Brazilian Amazon, Wesley Saint-Fleur could only muster a look of exhaustion and bewilderment.

Months ago, he boarded a bus in Haiti, before getting on a plane in the Dominican Republic, landing first in Panama and then in Ecuador. That was where his wife gave birth to their son, Isaac, he said, bouncing the 4-month-old infant on his knee and brandishing the boy’s Ecuadorean identification card. Then they continued by bus yet again, through Ecuador and Peru. Next, they trekked by foot in Bolivia, where he said the police robbed him and his wife of their clothing and their life savings: $320 in cash. “Then we finally got to Brazil, which I’m told is building everything, stadiums, dams, roads,” said Saint-Fleur, 27, a construction worker, one of hundreds of Haitians who gather each day around the gazebo in Brasileia’s palm-fringed plaza. “All I want is work, and Brazil, thank God, has jobs for us.”

Gambling everything, thousands of Haitians have made their way across the Americas to reach small towns in the Brazilian Amazon over the past year in a desperate search for work, including a surge of hundreds arriving recently amid fears that Brazil’s government could slow the influx before it overwhelms the authorities here.

Their improbable journeys – from the rubble of their island homes to remote outposts here in the Amazon – say as much about the dire economic conditions that persist in Haiti two years after the earthquake as it does about the rising economic profile of Brazil, which is fast becoming a magnet not only for poor foreign labourers but also for growing numbers of educated professionals from Europe, the United States and Latin America.

Upon arriving here and in other border outposts, the Haitians are often given vaccinations, clean water and two meals a day by the authorities. Many stay for weeks in Brasileia and other towns before being granted humanitarian visas that allow them to work in Brazil.

But with such a crush of new arrivals, others have not been so lucky. After travelling thousands of kilometres and overcoming countless obstacles, some crowd eight to a small hotel room or wind up sleeping on the streets, almost reliving the misery they had hoped to leave behind.

“I cannot allow the sadness to take over, since opportunity will follow this hard phase,” said Simonvil Cenel, 33, a tailor awaiting a visa who leads animated evangelical prayer services for those stuck in limbo after enduring so much to get here.

About 4,000 Haitians have immigrated to Brazil since the 2010 earthquake, often going first through Ecuador, a poorer country with lax visa policies. Brazil has made an exception for Haitians in contrast to job-seekers from nations like Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, who arrive via similar Amazonian routes but are usually expelled.

With the number of Haitians sharply increasing, the authorities in Brasileia and Tabatinga, a border city in Amazonas state, have warned of the strains of trying to feed and house the Haitians while visa applications are reviewed. Federal officials have responded by sending tons of food for the Haitians, who number more than 1,000 in each border settlement.

Dealing with an immigration crisis on its border is a new dilemma for Brazil, which until recently was more concerned with the outflow of its own citizens seeking opportunities in rich industrialized countries than responding to the arrival of thousands of impoverished foreigners.

The authorities estimate that about 500 Haitians now live in Porto Velho and that about 700 are in Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon. Hundreds more have made it to Sao Paulo, Brazil’s economic capital. Companies like Fibratec, a swimming pool manufacturer in southern Santa Catarina state, have even sent managers all the way here to hire dozens of Haitians.

In addition to meeting demand for cheap labour, the effort to let Haitians work in Brazil speaks to the country’s ambitions of wielding greater regional influence, by attempting to find ways of alleviating problems in the hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Since 2004, Brazil has sent troops to lead a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti. But there are now more Haitians in Brazil than Brazilian soldiers in Haiti. In September, Brazil announced that it would start drawing down its 2,000 troops in the Caribbean nation.

Most of the Haitians hope to spend just a few weeks in Brasileia’s immigration limbo, before moving on.