Roma migration
CONTENTS, FOREWORD
Contents
Michael Stewart: Foreword
Kováts, András: Migration Among the Roma Population in Hungary
Vajda, Imre - Prónai, Csaba: Romanian Roma in Hungary: Beggars, Merchants, Workers. A Case Study
Hajnal, László Endre: The Roma in Canada: Emigration from Hungary from the second half of the 1990s
Miklósi, Gábor: "It's Got to Go Through!" A Case Study
Kállai, Ernő: Gypsy Musicians
Hell, István: The Zámoly Roma - the Road Ended in Strasbourg
Bognár, Katalin - Kováts, András: The Migration of Roma as Reflected in the Hungarian Press
Reason or Abandonment. Report of the Monitoring Group of the Publicity Club on the Presentation of the Zámoly Roma Affair in the Hungarian Press
Kováts, András: The Opinion of the Hungarian Population on Roma Migration. A Research Report
APPENDIX
Parliamentary Speeches related to Roma Migration. Compiled by András Kováts
The Chronology of Roma Migration as Based on Reports Published in the Hungarian Press Between June 1997 and April 2001.
Compiled by Katalin Bognár
Foreword
In August 1998, just after the Schengen EU countries had promised to consider changing the visa requirements for Romanians, the satirical Romanian weekly, Academia Caţavencu, carried the headline: "Watch Out Swans of Europe, Here We Come!" The joke referred to an incident notorious within Romania at least when Romanian migrants (of uncertain ethnic origin, but believed to be Roma by most Romanians) had been accused of killing and roasting Viennese swans during a sojourn in the Austrian capital. In the face of the double standards, the hypocrisy, the bureaucratic nonsense and the sheer medieval thinking about migration issues in 'united Europe,' Academia Caţavencu's sublime mockery may seem the only approach likely to cut through the horse shit. That is, until you receive a book like this one in your hands.
For here, at last, is some well informed, solidly researched and soberly thought through analysis of migration in its economic, social, political and human contexts. Of course, the occasion of the research was the local, Hungarian hoo-haa consequent on the 'flight/ migration' of the Zámoly Roma to Strasbourg (a political storm very helpfully documented from several diverse angles by several of the contributors here). But the research project has gone far beyond the confines of a debate shaped by a paranoid political rhetoric which now, as so often in the past, seeks to lay the blame for Hungary's miseries on some bloody foreigners aided by treacherous (former?) Hungarians now living abroad. It is fashionable to accuse social science of irremediable parti pris, but in this book we have a case in which true dividends are paid by even that minimal extra degree of objectivity which derives from a 'scientific/research' discourse. For, in the face of political strategies (on all sides) that inevitably reduce and simplify social reality in order to mobilise constituencies, research such as this complicates and dissolves firm lines of demarcation. It takes no special foresight to see that because it does so, this book will be attacked from all sides in the hot house of today's Roma issue in Hungary.
There are a number of general merits to this book. First, and foremost, it demolishes the simplistic suggestion that Hungarian Roma migration is either merely a response to economic immiseration here and opportunities elsewhere or a product of de facto if not de jure persecution. (You will forgive me if I leave aside the imaginative suggestion that it is a Jewish inspired conspiracy to undermine poor Hungary's international reputation.) This is an important issue because of the simplistic imagery which dominates much popular thinking about migration. There is an image in the western media (and not just in the popular, tabloid press) of western/northern immigration policy acting like a dam, blocking a great pent-up flow of would be migrants eager to flee from poverty to wealth. The reality, as 25 years of free movement of labour between Spain, Portugal, Greece and the northern countries of the EU has shown, is that 'even large differences in economic returns (measured by wages) are not sufficient to induce migration in most people' (Glover et al., 2001: 3). As Kováts notes in his introduction here, only 3-4% of the Hungarian population at large would consider working abroad and half that number entertain the idea of moving abroad permanently. So, if larger numbers of Roma are migrating or considering migrating from Hungary than other Hungarian citizens, this is unlikely to be due to a simple calculation of wage differentials. The sad fact is that there is a growing tendency in Hungary for Roma to feel that Hungary is less and less a desirable place to live. And in Miklósi Gábor's presentation of one woman's asylum application we can see why. 'Maria's' story of abandoning her job after pressure from the chief nurse and refusals by white Hungarians to be given injections by a 'Gypsy' rings horribly and bitterly true. Presented with an opportunity to move, the most ambitious, the most qualified and the most imaginative seem increasingly likely to make the leap into migration. Note, however, that this is not to bring on stage the journalistic image of 'Roma migration' as a general phenomenon characterising all Roma communities in Hungary. What this book offers is a rich picture of the extreme heterogeneity among Roma communities, families and individuals. As the researchers show (Kállai, especially), many of those who might be expected to take advantage of migratory possibilities do not in fact do so.
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Michael Stewart