A lot of them have houses 10 times the size of this," she says, glancing around the pretty, immaculately maintained two-bedroom house she shares with her Irish husband, Pat, on a new estate in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford.
Doesn't it all sound a bit reminiscent of what many Irish people say about Travellers? There is no comparison with Irish Travellers; I know some of them. They seem very honest to me, nice, sincere. In Romania the gypsies are complaining and complaining. They are here for money, not because they're treated badly in Romania. They even have their own special government department, run by a Gypsy. Although she was born into a relatively well-off family in the city of Iasi, an eight- to hour train journey from Bucharest, and is a qualified accountant, Breen's life has not been easy.
Her first husband was killed in a car crash in , leaving her with a three-year-old daughter, Smeranda. Holding down a responsible and stressful job, she developed serious health problems, requiring two years of chemotherapy in Bucharest. Her parents - already sharing the care of Smeranda with her sister - had to sell their car to pay for transport and allow them to stay with her in Bucharest during treatment.
Afterwards, although not fully recovered from her health problems, she set up an accountancy business. Scarce money was spent on things such as educating her daughter, who went to a special English school. Like all Romanians, the family had a small plot of land in the countryside, where she grew potatoes to make ends meet and buy her first car.
Then she got a contract with a Romanian-German company, which sent her to Germany for work experience. Through a manager there she met Pat Breen from Co Dublin.
Five years later the mere mention of him brings happy tears to the eyes of this fiercely independent woman. He is the best father she could have had, and I could cry for days about how good he is as a grandfather to Smeranda's child. I love him to bits. Nonetheless, at the beginning, life in Ireland was a mixed bag for her. She had money enough to rent a house straight away, so she was dependent on nobody. When she went seeking a work permit from the Department of Foreign Affairs the first surprise was the sight of so many refugees.
But I never met anyone racist anywhere in the Government Departments; I never felt I was just another immigrant.
I didn't have a lot of problems, because I had Pat as my guarantor. But despite her international qualifications and a CV translated by her embassy and lodged with 10 recruitment companies, she encountered one major obstacle: her English.
It's like you're blind, deaf and dumb. You have to learn English if you want to live here. So I was crying every night, trying to learn it from tapes, from books, papers, everything. I always just felt if an employer gave me the chance they'd never let me go. It was Pat who suggested that her job-hunting might yield better results down the country. The figure shows that compared with the non-Roma, the Roma—and in particular the more traditional ones, tend to have larger households; they tend to travel in larger groups; and they are far more likely to travel with close family members.
When these networks and relationships are mobilized for migration purposes, I argue, they can to some extent substitute economic and formal resources which the Roma often lack.
Family and network resources, by ethnic identity: Share who report that their household in Romania consists of more than six people; that they travelled to Scandinavia in a group of four people or more; and that they are staying in Scandinavia together with close family members. So far we have discussed resources in terms of the structural poverty that motivate migration and the social capital which enable it.
However, economic migrants also need to generate income. Begging, the primary strategy employed by Romanian Roma in Scandinavia, not only requires bodily training and specific skills Tesar ; as Thomassen points out it is also a form of exchange in which, due to its marginal and liminal nature, central norms regarding morality and worth are being negotiated Thomassen This stigma, I argue, represents a major barrier against begging as an economic strategy.
Consider, for example, the following excerpt from field notes in a migrant hotspot outside Buzau in Romania:. Speaking to a local non-Roma woman—highly knowledgeable about the intricacies of travel and finding spots to beg and places to sleep in Stockholm—it became clear that she was quite envious of her migrant neighbours.
Because for non-Roma villagers living in migration hot spots, the most typical reaction when discussing migration and begging was not envy, but outrage over what they saw as immoral behaviour:. We know what they are doing there! They are begging for money, stealing, and doing all kinds of things.
They have no shame, the way they act. It is a shame for the whole village. Migrant beggars provoke considerable hostility in Scandinavia too, something of which they were well aware. In the quantitative survey a majority of beggars reported experiences of being chased from public spaces, refused access to shops, being shouted at and spat on in the streets, etc.
The Roma are by no means immune to the denigration and contempt they face both at home and in Scandinavia. Yes, of course they look down upon us [for going abroad to beg]. But they look down upon us anyway, no matter what we do. What do they know? A few told us how they felt shameful for begging, and that they preferred more respectable means of income, such as collecting bottles or selling magazines.
But most informants would talk about begging in a detached and instrumental manner. Roma street workers would more often go into detailed comparisons of how much one could earn per day, and what were the best spots or time of day to beg. And while most beggars and street workers had experienced instances of harassment and hostility from locals in Scandinavia, the Roma often downplayed their significance, insisting that it was no big deal and that the hostility was probably justified.
Most Roma beggars seemed to have just as few ambitions or illusions of gaining the respect and recognition of people in Scandinavia. In many ways, oppositional identities resemble the fox and the sour grapes: Unable to reach the grapes that hang above him, the fox declared them sour, because after all, it is better not to want the things you cannot get Elster The grapes in this case being moral recognition from the surrounding majority.
In turn, it allows them to pursue economic strategies others perceive as too shameful. First, we measure adherence to the traditional prohibition within Roma society against women wearing trousers in public. As Fig. Among the assimilated Roma, the number is 33 per cent, while as much as 72 per cent of the traditional Roma find this unacceptable. As one of the more tangible ritual taboos which mark the boundary between Roma and non-Roma, I argue that adherence to this taboo is a good proxy for Roma oppositional identity.
Second, we may use a direct measure of attitudes towards begging. Once again we find an ethnic dimension, from 29 per cent among the non-Roma to 61 per cent among the traditional Roma. So far, the quantitative data has showed that structural marginalization, family social capital and oppositional identities all appear to display a distinct ethnic dimension, in the sense that they are more commonly found among Roma than non-Roma, and that they are more commonly found among the more traditional Roma than among the more assimilated Roma.
The question, however, is to what extent these concepts can explain the practice of transnational begging. Since we do not have quantitative data on the population of potential migrants in sending regions in Romania, we cannot say anything about why some people migrate while others stay home.
However, we may say something about why some people pursue begging as an income strategy once abroad, while others follow alternative economic strategies. A multivariate logistic regression using a dummy variable on whether or not having begged for money during the last week as the dependent variable may provide an answer. Table 2 shows the results. In the first step of the model, we introduce the control variables, which include gender and city, as well as Roma identity as predictor variables.
It shows that within the population of Romanian migrants living on the streets in Scandinavia: 1 women are far more likely to beg than men. In step 2, five new explanatory variables are introduced.
Logistic regression: Probability of having begged for money last week. The results in step 2 shows that both indicators of poverty have a significant effect on likelihood of begging: those who cannot read or write are more likely to beg than those who can, and those who lack piped water inside their house in Romania.
Family social capital also has an effect, as those who have large households are significantly more likely to beg than those belonging to smaller households.
This, of course, may be a case of adaptive preferences, as people who beg for other reasons such as extreme poverty may try to cope with their situation by adapting their attitudes. This is analogous to how the concept of oppositional identities itself refers to a form of adaptive attitude.
However, even when controlling for attitudes towards begging, we find that those who find it unacceptable for women to wear trousers are more likely to beg than those who do not, suggesting that norms matter beyond mere attitudes towards begging as such. An important result is that once indicators of structural poverty, family social capital and oppositional identities are introduced in step two, the effects of the original variables changes.
The effect of gender is only slightly reduced, which reflects that begging is generally more common—and more lucrative—for women. The difference between Oslo and Stockholm is, however, no longer significant, suggesting that the higher likelihood of begging among those residing in Stockholm is primarily a composition effect.
The lower likelihood of begging in Copenhagen remains significant, suggesting that the Danish criminal ban on begging has an independent effect on choice of strategy. Most importantly, however, the effect of Roma ethnic identity is considerably reduced.
In step one, being traditional Roma increased the odds of begging with a measure of more than 8. In step two, this is reduced to approximately 2. With EU open borders and few alternative options at home, many go abroad to beg for money or engage in other types of informal street work in richer countries in the West.
In many rural Roma communities, transnational migration for begging and street work has now become an institutionalized practice, constituting the backbone of the local economy. Throughout Europe, this has become a renewed source of moral panic, condemnation and ethnic prejudice towards Roma. A key purpose of this article has been to bridge the gap between overly structural and overly cultural understandings of this phenomenon.
Specifically, I argue that in order to understand marginal migration and begging as an institutionalized practice, three distinct factors must be taken into account. To understand the ability of many Roma to engage in marginal migration despite lacking in formal resources, one must take into account social capital in the form of family and village networks, which provide people with information, opportunities, resources and support that are vital in overcoming the risks and challenges of migration outside formal institutions.
However, as Brazzabeni et al. Begging may not provide a viable solution to their poverty. But given the desperate situation of many Roma communities, one may argue that going to Scandinavia to beg—without letting status-concerns or the moral sensitivities of mainstream society stop them—is a testament to their inventiveness and perseverance in a hostile world. The policy lessons should be sobering. With free movement and open borders, states are not able to fully prevent unwanted migration from within EU.
Instead, internal regulations such as anti-begging legislation are increasingly used to control the mobility of unwanted populations Fekete , and authorities in Scandinavia have more generally responded to the loss of direct control by mobilizing municipal workers and local police as everyday gatekeepers Tervonen and Enache An implicit strategy has been to deter their entry by making life unpleasant through various forms of disruption and criminalization of their activities, while providing only a bare minimum of services.
A recurring argument, for example, among local politicians in Scandinavia has been to avoid setting up public bathrooms because they might attract migrant Roma. The present analysis suggests why such efforts have only limited effect. Romanian migrant Roma are strongly motivated by a desperate situation and lack of alternatives back home; at the same time, they are quite resilient to the harassment and general unpleasantness that police, local governments and municipalities may throw at them.
As long as there is money to be made through begging and street work, and the alternative options back home are worse, many will continue to brave the journey. At the same time, in order to maintain a sense of self-respect and notions of worth in the face of the contempt with which they are met both in Scandinavia and at home, they will most likely also continue to cultivate their internal bonds of kinship and the moral boundaries between themselves and the outside world.
RDS analysis also consists of estimators that use network size and homophily in recruitment to adjust for sample bias. However, since the analysis here will focus on relationships between variables, not population estimates, unadjusted data will be used. Barany Z. New York : Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar. Google Preview. Blasco P. Oxford : Berg Publishers. Bourdieu P. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York : Greenwood. Brazzabeni M.
New York : Berghahn Books. Carling J. Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo. Cherkezova S. Csepeli G. Czaika M. Djuve A. Migrants from Romania on the Streets of the Scandinavian Capitals. Copenhagen, Denmark : The Rockwool Foundation. Elster J. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Engebrigtsen A. Formoso B. Paris : L'Harmattan. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Fraser A. Fukuyama F. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York : Macmillan Publishers. Giddens A. Gmelch G. Granovetter M. Grill J. Oxford : Berghahn Books. Hayden R.
Heckathorn D. Massey D. Oxford, UK : Clarendon Press. Matras Y. Fact Sheets on Roma. Strasbourg : Council of Europe. Mauss M. Nacu A. Nemeth D. Ogbu J. Okely J. Pantea M. Parry J. Or are we supposed to imagine that there are people prepared to uproot themselves and their small ones, with maximum uncertainty and danger, on a whim? Nor is there any talk of how dramatically immigration policy has shifted in Britain and throughout the European Union: of how, since the s, important distinctions between asylum seekers and other kinds of deserving migrants have been eroded, so that, for the first time in our modern history and in pitiful contrast to the benevolent policies of the post-war period , the low immigration targets set by governments have taken priority and influenced the assessment of would-be immigrants from the poorer world.
In other words, the question of "need" is no longer about them and theirs, it's about us and ours. The barbaric feel of many recent reports has much to do with ignorance - both genuine and wilful: the easiest way to dehumanise people is to strip them of any context, of any history. And, with very little in the way of a written history of their own, with no book, no anthem, no flag or popular story about the founding of their nation; with no state or power of any kind except in numbers, the Gypsies are particularly vulnerable to such mythologising.
The centre-piece of the current story, and its proud centerpiece, is the assertion that Gypsies despise their own children - the flipside of the old favourite that they steal other people's babies - and cynically use them as "props". Here is what I know about Gypsies and their babies, gleaned from many years of study, predominantly in eastern and central Europe. First, being a mother is regarded as a woman's single-most important task; indeed, failure to bear children often leads to shame and even exclusion from the group.
Second, Gypsy women, whatever the earnings of their husbands, are ultimately charged with supporting and feeding their children. Third, the women - for whom begging is not generally felt to be shameful as it would be for the men - are deeply resistant to being separated from their children under any circumstances.
They, in turn, are reliably scandalised by the way non-Gypsy women willingly arrange for their children to be cared for by non-family members. Gypsies are profoundly mistrustful of outside influences: understandable, when you consider the draconian drives, at least in eastern and central Europe, to assimilate them. Since the 18th century such measures have included the removal of Gypsy children into Christian institutions and homes a practice continued in Switzerland until , and, under the communists, the compulsory changing of Gypsy names.
All in all, in any interaction with non-Gypsies, at home or abroad, they live in tense anticipation of ill-will, bad faith, rejection and harm. If children are toughened by what they see, their parents may feel that this is appropriate training for an expected lifetime of hate directed at them. It is worth reminding ourselves of their extraordinary past, not as "some sopping-wet liberal excuse", but as the only meaningful basis for intelligent discussion about their future, in Britain and elsewhere.
And such a discussion must be of interest to us all, not just because they are Europeans too, but because they are Europe's largest and fastest growing minority. The lives of Gypsies, since they left India at the beginning of the last millennium, has consisted of deportation and nomadism, homelessness and statelessness, interwoven with episodes of forced assimilation as well as incarceration and massacre.
In Romania, where most of these recent arrivals come from, Gypsies were slaves for years, until when slavery was abolished in Romania. Under the Nazis, at least half a million were murdered. They were the only group apart from the Jews slated for annihilation on racial grounds. Gypsies have only recently begun to commemorate their Holocaust dead, but they remain without a homeland.
Perhaps uniquely they are also without any apparent desire for one. Instead, these periods of extreme persecution are reasonably regarded by them as forming part of the great continuum of persecution. It would not be far-fetched to wonder whether, in the case of the Gypsies, "nomad" is perhaps nothing more than a travel agent's kind of term for "deportee". And what of the situation of Gypsies today?
A brief look at a recent week in the life of Gypsies around Europe shows that there is rather more to the story than the nursery frighteners and prejudices of our grandparents that are emotionally invoked in place of investigation. On March 2, in Tirgu-Mures, Romania, four policemen reportedly punched a drunk Gypsy to the ground and then kicked him as a crowd of Gypsies looked on.
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