[QUOTE=Hampshire]
How do Europeans view them, are they as big of a problem as it seems, what are other countries doing to fix the problem, etc?
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I’m not sure what the situation is in Italy, but I would assume it’s not very different from France. So, about the situation in France :
There are several sub-groups of Roma (I’m writing Roma here because I know it’s the PC word in the USA, but actually, contrarily to what a previous poster say, they don’t necessarily want to be called “Roma”). For instance, in France, most are Sintis or Manouches, or in the south, Gitanos. They have been here for centuries, and have always been viewed with at the very least suspicion and contempt. Nowadays, many have settled, but not all of them (finding reliable figures is pretty difficult). They are still viewed with suspicion, and there are frequently issues when they decide to camp somewhere. They’re rarely welcomed with open arms. Part of those (people working in entertainment, like musicians, owners of rides , circus artists, etc..) have more or less found a place in society, but it’s not the majority.
Now, since the fall of the Iron Curtain (and even before that in the case of Yugoslavian) a significant number of Roma from central Europe entered in western Europe. I assume that everybody knows that being an illegal immigrant is no fun to begin with. But here, there’s a lot of aggravating factors. Most illegal aliens are young adults intending to more or less fit in and send money back home to their family. In the case of Romas, they generally came with the whole family. They often aren’t interested in fitting in, but rather want to keep their independent way of life. Most illegal aliens also have a network. They rely on people from the same country, relatives,etc.. already living in the country to help them find a house, a job, and so on. There’s no such network for Roma. Non-Roma Romanians, (for instance) couldn’t care less about them, at the contrary. French Roma (like the Sintis I mentioned above), as far as I understand, aren’t very fond of these newcomers, either.
So, what generally happened? They ended up in slums, the kind of you normally only see in third-world countries, at the outskirts of towns. And they lived out, for a significant part, of begging and petty crime. This was exacerbated by the fact that actually there was some sort of “network”. But this network was gangs, some with very unsavoury practice like “importing” children in order to use them as beggars or thieves. This is depicted, by the way, in Kusturica’s movie “Time of the Gypsies”, that, while I’m at it, I highly recommend (not as a reference, because it’s not at all realistic, but it’s an excellent movie nevertheless). Eventually, the local authorities would round up everybody, manage to sent them back home with the reluctant agreement of the country they came from (when said country wasn’t at war, like the former Yugoslavia), until a new group would show up.
That’s this latter group that you’re seeing in western cities (Not always, though. For instance I understand that currently, this kind of children exploitation is, in Paris, in the hands of Romanian, but not Roma, gangs). It’s also these Roma that people have a big problem with. The “local Roma” are, most of the time, essentially invisible (though once again, those aren’t well perceived, either when they do show up). And it’s becoming a big issue in Italy because this country is sort of on the front line, and because borders were opened when central European countries joined the EU, so, it’s not as easy to just round them up and send them back home. And whatever “home” has to offer to them anyway isn’t any better than what they find in Italy, France, etc… They’re outcast everywhere.
I’m not sure what is the future of these people. They’re foreigners, extremely poor, not only are segregated but also self-segregating, the level of education is low or even abysmal, at the risk of being seen as a racist, crime is quite rampant amongst them, and finally there’s no much place for people who won’t settle in a modern society, and the little room that could exist is already taken by the local Romas. I assume that they will eventually assimilate and become for the most part regular Italian, French, etc…, citizens, but this could take a couple generations, and I’m not sure what they’re going to do meanwhile.
She and her husband both used to be traveling merchants (they had a weekly circuit of street markets) and she’d thought it might be a good idea to get a store in town and simply sell at street market prices there, as this way she’d be less tired at the end of the day and their daughter would be able to go to the store after school and do her homework there, rather than have to go to one of her grandma’s (both of which are all for education but don’t quite understand that it involves homework). This was about 10 years ago, the daughter is in college now and the store is doing fine, thank you.