Brazil is the developing country outside the Middle East which has received the largest number of Syrian refugees. Thanks to a special program established in September 2013, the country has issued more than 8000 “humanitarian visas” to individuals “affected by the conflict in Syria”. Initially intended to last two years, the program was prorogued in September 2015 for another two years. Whereas the country is dealing with severe recession, Brazilian authorities expect to at least double the number of those humanitarian visas by 2017. Brazil has one of the most progressive refugee policies of the “Global South” – with solid institutions ensuring a series of rights, such as the ability to work as soon as the asylum application process is initiated or the right to family reunification without conditions –, but the country only offers poor welcoming facilities. With no state-funded programs for language training or other specific social benefits, Syrian refugees have difficulties to access basic public services, particularly health care and housing. While asking for more government assistance is excluded in a time of economic crisis, Syrians rely almost exclusively on ethnic and religious networks, and a handle of local NGOs. Based on an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews with refugees and associations leaders, as well as a press review, this paper explores individual strategies deployed by Syrian refugees to navigate Brazil’s administrative, economic and cultural challenges, and identifies some common patterns. Three major categories frame their collective identification: race, class, and ethnicity. While refugeeness was until recently largely associated in Brazilian media with Haitians – “black and uneducated refugees competing with local poor” –, the majority of Syrians try to re-negotiate the refugee label as “white” “entrepreneurs” and/or “hard-working” “skilled” employees, drawing upon the image built one century earlier by Syrian-Lebanese immigrants. The presence of a large and old Syrian diaspora well represented among Brazilian middle and upper classes involves both opportunities and constraints. On the one hand, diaspora networks do provide some assistance to refugees and contribute to mitigate Brazilian unfamiliarity with Middle Eastern culture. However, on the other hand, they can also be the space for invisible exploitation and silencing political views, as the majority of the traditional Syrian-Lebanese organizations – mostly Christian – strongly support the regime of Bashar al Assad.