Other states with significant percentages are: Mato Grosso do Sul (42.4%), Rio de Janeiro (42%) and Minas Gerais (41.1%) and Espírito Santo (38.6) São Paulo has the largest population in absolute numbers with over 25 million whites.

[10] However, the most recent census in 2010 showed a shift in mentality, with a growing number of Brazilians identifying themselves as brown or Black, accompanied by a decrease in the percentage of whites,[13] with affirmative action and identity valorisation being factors.

The typical Portuguese settler in Brazil was a young man in his late teens or in his early twenties, coming from the provinces of Northern Portugal, most notably Minho and Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, or from the Atlantic islands.

The Dutch were able to control most of the Brazilian Northeast – then the most dynamic part of Brazil – for about a quarter century, but were unable to change the ethnic makeup of the colonizing population, which remained overwhelmingly Portuguese by origin and culture.

The genetic finding matches with the explanation of sociologist Darcy Ribeiro about the ethnic formation of the Brazilian Gaúchos: they are mostly the result of the miscegenation of Spanish and Portuguese males with Amerindian females.

The Italians, pressured by the poverty that plagued Italy, headed for rural settlements in southern Brazil, where they became small farmers, as well as for coffee farms in the southeast, where they replaced slave labor.

[citation needed] In that year over two thousand Swiss migrants from the Canton of Fribourg arrived to settle in an inhospitable area near Rio de Janeiro that would later be renamed Nova Friburgo.

[58] South American oligarchies, which remained predominantly of European origin, believed – in syntony with the racialist theories then widespread in Europe – that the large numbers of blacks, Amerindians and mixed-race people who made up the majority of the population were a handicap to the development of their countries.

[62] The influence of the environment cannot be underestimated: immigrants who went to coffee farms or urban centers assimilated more easily, as there was daily contact with Brazilians, generating common interests, friendships and mixed marriages.

[62] In turn, the immigrants who went to the rural settlements (colonies) were gathered in isolated groups, maintaining little contact with the rest of the Brazilian society, which allowed the maintenance of language and ethnic identity for generations.

Most of the 4,431,000 immigrants that entered the country between 1821 and 1932 settled in São Paulo (state) and other Southeastern states:[71] São Paulo received most of the Italians (Veneto, Lombardy, Campania, Tuscany, Calabria, Liguria, Piedmont, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna, Abruzzi e Molise and Basilicata) and Spaniards (Galicians, Castilians and Catalans) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and from the 1910s on most of the Lithuanians, Dutch, French, Hungarians, Baltic Finns, Ashkenazi Jews (from diaspora communities in Poland, Romania, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia and Czechoslovakia), Latvians, Greeks, Armenians, Czech, Croatians, Slovenians, Bulgarians, Albanians and Georgians;[72][73][74][75][76][36][77][78][79][80][81][82] Rio de Janeiro (state) received most of the Portuguese immigrants followed by SP, as well as most of the Swiss and Belgians.

São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro followed by Paraná also received most of the English-Welsh and Scots;[74][36][83][84][85][86] The countryside of Espírito Santo was mainly populated by people arriving from Germany, especially Pomeranians (Prussia), Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, France, Romania, Slovakia and Iberia, comprising chiefly Catalans but including Basques and Andorrans.

[92] The vast majority of Slavs is concentrated in Paraná, mainly Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians, followed by German and Italian dwellers in the countryside who also arrived to populate the sparsely inhabited South.

Some localities like Mallet, a 19th-century settlement founded by Poles from Austrian Galicia (Eastern Europe) and Ukrainians that grew up to be a town, still maintain both their languages and traditions in a Polish-Ukrainian continuum.

After 1909 Dutch settlers became accountable for the dairy farming development in the prairies region of the state, known as Campos Gerais do Paraná, where today are the towns of Castro and Carambeí dubbed Little Holland.

The capital, Curitiba, is home to a large figure of Volga Germans that outnumbered the initial and primary Bandeirante descent population during the Imperial period, Faroese people and other Scandinavians, as well as to Slavs, Italians, French, Swiss, Spaniards and one of the country's Jewish communities.

The town of Brusque founded by Austrian Baron von Schneeburg bringing German families from the Grand Duchy of Baden to settle in the northeast of Santa Catarina, besides receiving additional waves of Italians from the Tyrol–South Tyrol–Trentino Euroregion, Poles and Swedes, was also one of the destinations in the South and Southeast for American Confederate settlers in 1867, differing from São Paulo and Paraná colonies, where the American Confederate presence gave birth to new towns such as Americana in São Paulo.

Neighboring towns such as Nova Trento founded in 1875, similarly received subjects from the Austro-Hungarian Empire because Italian-speaking Tyroleans known as trentinos and Germans from the Kingdom of Prussia, historic Swabia and Baden faced an immense crisis in the agricultural sector caused by the conflicts of the unification of Italy and Germany respectively, that weakened local trade.

Istrian Italians under the Austrian Empire rule also fled Istria to settle in Brazil, and a few towns like Nova Veneza, founded in 1891 still have an over 90% Venetian population of which many still speak the Talian dialect.

[135] Polish can still be heard in small towns such as Mallet, Paraná, where the vast majority of the population descends from Western and Northern Slavic settlers who arrived in Brazil in the 1890s (mostly Poles who came from Galicia which was under Austrian rule then).

[139][140] More than 20,000 Ukrainians came to Brazil between 1895 and 1897, settling mostly in the countryside of Paraná and working as farmers in the state, today a land of regnant Orthodox churches, where Slavic traditions can be witnessed all over the territory.

[75] Dutch and other Low Franconian languages are still spoken in São Paulo (state), especially Holambra (named after Holland-America-Brazil), famous for its tulips and the annual Expoflora event, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul and around Ponta Grossa, Castrolanda and Carambeí known as little Holland, in the plains of Paraná, headquarters of several food companies and a dairy farming region.

The district is centered around Republic of Lithuania Plaza (Praça República Lituânia), where 7 streets meet up (one of them named after a Lithuanian priest Pijus Ragažinskas (Pio Ragazinskas, 1907–1988) who started the only Lithuanian-Brazilian newspaper "Mūsų Lietuva").

[167] The bordering state of Paraná was the main destination in the South, followed by Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, where Americans arrived in 1867 settling in growing towns such as Brusque.

[82][44] Anusim or Portuguese and Dutch Marrano Crypto Jews can be found in every one of the 5 geographical regions, but are most common in the Northeast, with Pernambuco having one of the largest Converso populations due to colonial history.

Xuxa Meneghel, a television presenter, film actress, singer and successful businesswoman born in Rio Grande do Sul, has the highest net worth of any Brazilian female entertainer, estimated at US$350 million.

This, considering the facts that the slave trade was effectively suppressed in 1850, and that the Amerindian population had been reduced to small numbers even earlier, shows that at least 61% of white Brazilians had at least one ancestor living in Brazil before the beginning of the Great Immigration.

[219] According to another study (from 1965, and based on blood groups and electrophoretic markers) carried out on whites of Northeastern Brazilian origin living in São Paulo the ancestries would be 70% European, 18% African and 12% Amerindian admixture.

In this work we analyzed the information content of 28 ancestry-informative SNPs into multiplexed panels using three parental population sources (African, Amerindian, and European) to infer the genetic admixture in an urban sample of the five Brazilian geopolitical regions.

A study from 1965, Methods of Analysis of a Hybrid Population (Human Biology, vol 37, number 1), led by the geneticists D. F. Roberts e R. W. Hiorns, found out the average the Northeastern Brazilian to be predominantly European in ancestry (65%), with minor but important African and Native American contributions (25% and 9%).