With the dollar falling and the economy in Brazil booming, Brazilian immigrants in the United States are returning home by the thousands. Dan Grech reports.

Up to 10,000 Brazilian immigrants in Boston -- many of them here illegally -- are expected to follow Benicio home this year. Brazilian strongholds in New Jersey and South Florida are seeing a similar exodus.

Many immigrants say they are leaving because they feel lonely and afraid as local sentiment has turned against illegal immigrants and, for the first time in decades, these Brazilians have a viable alternative back home: a robust economy with plenty of jobs.

By MICHAEL ASTOR Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Brazil's largest city sold millions of dollars worth of carbon credits at an auction Wednesday in a deal that experts said paves the way for developing countries to make money fighting global warming.

Brazil's Mercantile and Futures Exchange called Sao Paulo's sale of $18.5 million in carbon credits to Dutch-Belgian Fortis Bank the first such sale to be held on a regulated stock market and a significant step toward institutionalizing the carbon market.

Under the Kyoto Treaty on greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, companies that generate large amounts of polluting carbon dioxide and methane can buy offsetting credits from projects that remove contaminants.

Until Wednesday's auction on the Brazil stock exchange, companies such as Fortis mostly purchased credits from individual sellers. Experts said the sale could be a major step toward creating a clearer system that could make buying and selling easier.

It's a warm Tuesday night in São Paulo, and as on most nights during rush hour here, a swarm of cars clogs every centimeter of Rebouças Avenue, slowing traffic to a crawl. But inside bus 7598, Carlos Soares holds on firmly to keep his balance as the jolting vehicle whizzes past the congestion. The bus he's on is one of thousands in this city that run in special lanes that cars are forbidden to use. Convoying one after the other, the buses form a kind of virtual train on tires.

"Look at their faces," says Soares, a 20-year-old video producer, pointing at the drivers stuck nearby. "They're mad because the buses took one of their lanes. But for us on the bus-we love it."

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With 26 391 buses, 1908 lines, 34 transfer stations, and 146.5 kilometers of dedicated busways, São Paulo operates what is currently the world’s most complex bus system. Extending from bustling downtown avenues to narrow neighborhood streets, this sprawling network of lines is the basis of public transportation here. One in every five paulistanos—as residents of São Paulo are called—hops on a bus every day to go to work, school, or other destinations. Daily bus rider­ship in the metropolitan area is some 10.5 million passengers. With such people-moving capacity, the entire population of Belgium could ride on São Paulo’s buses over the course of a single day.

In the 1960s, Curitiba, Brazil, took a radical approach to solving the problems most cities face: pollution, traffic, unchecked growth, and social and economic inequities. FRONTLINE/World Fellow Tim Gnatek traveled to Curitiba to discover whether this experiment in urban design has kept pace with the city's tenfold population boom.