The $15,000 Baby
How Russian families are trading pregnancies for passports
A Russian woman lands in Florianópolis, Brazil. She’s eight months pregnant. She has no family here, no job lined up, no Portuguese. She’ll be gone in three months.
But she’ll leave with something worth more than anything she brought.
This isn’t a story about refugees. It’s about a loophole, a war, and thousands of families who figured out how to buy time against an uncertain future.
Svetlana Ruseishvili has been watching Russians in Brazil since 2012. She’s a sociologist at the Federal University of São Carlos, and for years, the community she studied was small, unremarkable. Marriage migrants. A few academics recruited for their Soviet-era training. Musicians in the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra.
Then February 2022 happened.
Within months, her research subject transformed. New faces appeared in neighborhoods that had never seen Russians before. Telegram groups exploded with questions about rental prices, birth clinics, residency paperwork. By 2023, she and her colleague Sergey Ryazantsev were tracking a migration pattern that defied every category they knew.
The asylum numbers alone tell you something shifted. In 2019, twenty Russians applied for asylum in Brazil. In 2022, two hundred. In 2023, two hundred thirty-three.
But asylum is actually the minor channel here.
The major channel involves Article 12 of the Brazilian Constitution.
Brazil grants citizenship to anyone born on its soil. No exceptions. No conditions. A child born to two Russian tourists on a 90-day visa is, legally and irrevocably, Brazilian. That child can then sponsor their parents for permanent residency. And their grandparents. And their older siblings.
One birth. An entire family legalized.
The researchers have a term for this. They call it “strategic birth.”
The practice existed before the war, but 2022 changed its scale and its meaning. Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev found that family reunion permits issued to Russians jumped from 168 in 2019 to 633 in 2022 to 904 in 2023. A growth rate of 37 percent in just the final three years.
Florianópolis absorbed the majority. Between 2021 and 2023, 53 percent of all permanent residence permits issued to Russians in Brazil were concentrated in this single city.
Why there?
The answer requires understanding what Brazil looks like from Moscow.
Ask a Russian what they know about Brazil and you’ll get favelas, crime, carnival. Violence and chaos. One woman Ruseishvili interviewed admitted her pre-arrival knowledge consisted of a TV travel show and a reference in a Soviet novel. Another described his mental image as “favelas, high level of poverty, crime and carnival.”
Florianópolis offered an escape from this imagined Brazil.
Russian-language Instagram accounts had been marketing the city for years. European architecture. German and Italian heritage. Safe beaches. One interviewee explained his family’s reasoning with striking candor: “Santa Catarina is a state populated by Europeans, so for the most part it’s that, and it makes a difference. That’s why there’s such a difference in the standard of living.”
The pitch worked. Families who would never consider Rio or São Paulo found Florianópolis acceptable. More than acceptable. A place where they could wait out whatever was coming.
Here’s where the story gets strange.
These aren’t desperate people. The cost of a strategic birth runs around $15,000. That covers complicated international flights (most direct routes from Russia are now closed), three months’ rent in a decent neighborhood, and delivery at a private clinic. The families arriving can afford this. They have savings. They have remote income. Many work in IT.
In this sense, the migration resembles what scholars call lifestyle migration more than forced displacement. Matthew Hayes has documented North Americans relocating to Ecuador to stretch their retirement savings. Kristin Surak has tracked millionaires buying citizenship in Malta and Portugal. The Russian families in Florianópolis aren’t identical to either group, but they share something important: they’re not fleeing for survival. They’re optimizing.
And yet.
The push is political. Every family Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev interviewed spoke about the war, the mobilization, the closing down of Russian society. One respondent described the choice in stark terms: stay and face “wild tension, stress, constant survival every day” or leave and figure out the rest later.
This creates a category problem.
Forced migration scholars study the powerless. Lifestyle migration scholars study the privileged. What do you call people who are both? Who have the resources to choose their destination but are leaving because remaining has become intolerable?
The researchers settle on “war-induced migration of privilege.” It’s an awkward phrase, but it captures something real.
These families aren’t the Russian elite. If they were, they’d be in Monaco or Dubai, or they’d be buying Maltese passports for half a million euros. They’re the Russian middle class, and Brazil is what they can afford.
The US would be better. American birth tourism is the gold standard for this strategy. But it costs more, and visa restrictions make it harder. Brazil is the accessible path.
That accessibility is itself revealing.
In 2010, Brazil and Russia signed a bilateral agreement exempting each other’s citizens from tourist visas. Russians can enter Brazil and stay for 90 days, with the right to extend to 180. No approval required. No consular interview. No proof of return ticket.
This puts Russians in a privileged position relative to migrants from most of the developing world. Visa regimes, as migration scholar Mark Salter has argued, are political technologies that sort humanity into categories of desirability. Russians benefit from one of the more favorable sorting outcomes. They can show up and figure out their status later.
Most migrants cannot do this.
The contrast with Brazil’s treatment of other populations is uncomfortable. Haitians arriving after the 2010 earthquake faced a complicated humanitarian visa process. Venezuelans fleeing economic collapse received ad hoc measures that shifted repeatedly. When Ukrainians fled after February 2022, Brazil created a special humanitarian residence permit.
No such measure was created for Russians.
This makes a certain political sense. Ukrainians are victims of Russia. Russians are... what, exactly? Perpetrators? Dissidents? Neither category fits well.
So Russians fall through the existing channels. Asylum if they can demonstrate persecution. Family reunion if they have a Brazilian child. Digital nomad visa if they can prove remote income of $1,500 monthly.
Or they just overstay.
The system is permissive enough that various semi-regular arrangements become possible. You’re a tourist until you’re not. You apply for something while your 90 days tick down. The bureaucracy moves slowly, and slowness is its own kind of permission.
What the system does not offer is support.
Brazilian migration policy provides no financial assistance. No housing support. No language training. No job placement. If you arrive without resources, you’re on your own.
This filters the population. The Russians who come to Brazil and stay are, almost by definition, people who don’t need help. They’re not accessing public services. They’re not competing for Brazilian jobs. They’re living in a parallel economy of their own creation.
Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev documented this economy in detail.
Beauty salons. Catering services. Car rentals. Auto repair shops. Restaurants. After-school programs for children. Yoga classes. Portuguese tutors. Immigration lawyers. Birth brokers who arrange everything from hospital tours to apartment rentals.
The brokers came first. These are mostly Russian women who migrated to Brazil years ago, often through marriage. They saw opportunity in the new arrivals and built businesses around it. For a fee, they’d guide families through the entire strategic birth process.
But the brokers’ monopoly didn’t last.
As more families arrived, information began flowing horizontally. Telegram chats accumulated thousands of members. People shared experiences, recommendations, warnings. The same questions appeared and got answered repeatedly. Where to find a Russian-speaking obstetrician. Which neighborhoods to avoid. How long the residency paperwork actually takes.
Douglas Massey called this “cumulative causation.” Once a migration flow begins, it creates the infrastructure for its own expansion. Each family that arrives makes arrival easier for the next one.
The community is building itself.
But here’s the thing Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev kept encountering in their interviews: most of these families don’t plan to stay.
“I don’t really see myself in Brazil permanently,” one woman told them. She’d been living in Florianópolis since January 2022. She had her residence permit. She had her Brazilian-born child. And she was already thinking about leaving.
“It’s kind of far away from my parents and friends. I’d still like to be closer.”
Another respondent described the calculation explicitly. The plan was to stay one year, get documents for the children and themselves, and then reassess. If Russia stabilized, maybe return. If things got worse, maybe move to Europe. The Brazilian passport opens doors. It ranks 17th globally for visa-free access, compared to 51st for the Russian passport. With Brazilian citizenship, you can apply for a US visa valid for 10 years.
Brazil, in this framing, is not a destination. It’s a platform.
The researchers found this attitude pervasive. Families were investing the minimum necessary for naturalization (one year of residence, Portuguese proficiency) and keeping their options open. Some mentioned Portugal as a future destination. Others had no clear plan beyond acquiring the passport.
But time changes things.
Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev observed an interesting pattern among families who came for strategic births before the pandemic. They’d intended to leave immediately after getting their documents. Instead, they stayed for naturalization. And by the time they got their citizenship, they’d accumulated ties they hadn’t anticipated.
Property. Businesses. Children in schools. Friendships.
One woman described the turning point: “If we leave here, we’ll never come back again. It’s too far away. It’s hard with a big family. To move, we have to close everything here and then do it all over again. I don’t want to.”
She’d gone from tourist to permanent resident to citizen to, finally, someone who couldn’t imagine leaving.
Children seem to be the key variable. The more children, the harder displacement becomes. Each child is a set of social connections, school enrollments, friendships. Uprooting once is expensive. Uprooting repeatedly becomes impossible.
The families arriving now don’t know this yet. They’re in the early phase, when Brazil still feels temporary. The plan is always to move on. The plan is always to keep options open.
Whether they’ll follow through is a question Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev can’t answer. The migration is too recent. The geopolitical situation is too fluid. The war continues. Sanctions tighten and loosen. Russian domestic politics shifts in ways that change what return would mean.
What the researchers can say is that something new has formed in Florianópolis.
Not quite a diaspora. Not quite a community. A network, maybe. A structure of mutual aid and shared information that exists mostly in digital space, occasionally in physical space, always provisionally.
The naturalization numbers are rising. Twenty Russians became Brazilian citizens in 2021. Forty-four in 2022. A hundred forty in 2023. Each one represents a decision to invest in permanence, even if the intention is to leave.
The Brazilian government has yet to decide how to process the asylum claims that have piled up since 2022. Approval would validate a certain interpretation of what’s happening in Russia. Denial would send a different signal. The Committee for Refugees is slow, and slowness is, again, its own kind of answer.
Meanwhile, the maternity wards keep admitting Russian-speaking patients. The Telegram groups keep growing. The Portuguese classes keep filling.
Argentina, interestingly, has attracted more Russians than Brazil. Estimates range from 3,300 to 9,000. Buenos Aires has become a hub for Russian cultural events, performances, lectures. The draw is partly economic. Argentina’s inflation (211 percent in 2023) makes it extraordinarily cheap for anyone earning in foreign currency.
But some families specifically chose Brazil because Argentina’s instability frightened them. They’d already fled one country in crisis. They didn’t want to land in another.
“We realized that it would probably be for a long time. So we wanted a more stable country. And Brazil seemed more stable in contrast.”
Stability is relative.
What Ruseishvili and Ryazantsev have documented is, in one sense, a very specific story. A particular legal loophole. A particular war. A particular population with particular resources navigating particular constraints.
But in another sense, it’s a story about how global mobility actually works.
Citizenship is a resource. Some people inherit valuable versions. Others inherit less valuable versions. The gap can be closed, if you have the money and the knowledge and the willingness to act.
Brazilian citizenship costs $15,000 and a pregnant woman willing to travel. Maltese citizenship costs half a million euros and a willingness to wait. American citizenship costs either marriage, employment, or decades of legal immigration process.
The Russians in Florianópolis are navigating this system with clear eyes. They’re not naive about what they’re doing. They’re acquiring an asset. They’re hedging against an uncertain future. They’re giving their children options they themselves didn’t have.
Whether they’ll use those options to stay in Brazil, leave for Europe, or eventually return to Russia is unknown. The researchers will keep watching. The story isn’t finished.
But something has already happened that can’t be undone.
A generation of Russian children are growing up Brazilian. They were born in Florianópolis, issued Brazilian birth certificates, registered as citizens of a country their parents never expected to call home. Whatever their families do next, these children will carry Brazil with them. A passport. A legal claim. A door that will always be open.
Their parents bought them time. What they do with it is the next chapter.
Sources
Ruseishvili, S. & Ryazantsev, S. (2024). Transcontinental trajectories: Exploring Russian war-induced migration dynamics in Brazil. International Migration, 62, 189–210.
Surak, K. (2021). Millionaire mobility and the sale of citizenship. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47(1), 166–189.
Hayes, M. (2018). Gringolandia: Lifestyle migration under late capitalism. University of Minnesota Press.
Massey, D.S. (1990). Social structure, household strategies, and the cumulative causation of migration. Population Index, 56(1), 3–26.
Salter, M.B. (2006). The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: Borders, bodies, biopolitics. Alternatives, 31(2), 167–189.
Exodus-22. (2023). Mass exodus of Russians from the country in the context of war and mobilization: Overview analytics of two waves of military emigration.