Category Archives: romania

Violence at Cinecitta’ Station

"What if it was your mother? Your wife? Your sister?"

Nasty violence at Cinecitta’ station at the end of Rome’s Line A metro yesterday, in full daylight: after an argument in the line over whose turn it was, a 20-year old Roman struck a 32-year old Romanian nurse in the face. She went down and fractured her skull; he walked off and was later arrested. The security camera video up on the Corriere‘s website shows every detail, from the woman giving the man a push first to him calmly picking up his — ticket? — change? — off the ground, and then the extremely slow reaction time of the crowd. The man already had charges brought against him; for what the paper doesn’t say. I can’t but help thinking that national origin played a much larger role in this than age or gender. Would have he done the same to a 32-year old Italian? American? How much attention would this have gotten if it were Romanian-on-Romanian violence? One wonders.

Several years ago a Forza Nuova poster tried to stoke primitive fears with a provocative poster, intimating that the hordes from the east would be coming in to rape Italian women soon.  As we see, no nation necessarily has a premium on violence against women.

UPDATE: Life “hanging by a thread,” says Corriere.

Swiss Intolerance

If you thought Lega Nord images stereotyping Southern Italians and immigrants were bad, check out this new poster against the opening of Swiss borders to Italian (and other European – presumably Romanian) workers. Given that hordes of Milanese commute to Ticino and vice versa and that, uh, Italian is one of Switzerland’s official languages, this point to paint the Italian as ‘other’ seems particularly desperate. Corriere has good coverage in English, although the article suffers a bit from some self-pity. One wonders if anti-immigration proponents reading this — particularly the bit at the end about American perceptions of Italians a century ago — will note the parallels.

But is the ship really sinking?

More on the Roma Debate

Il Cav courtesy of Le Figaro

Berlusconi comes out with Sarkozy against criticism on France’s treatment of Roma. Quoted in Le Figaro yesterday, “[EU Citizen’s Rights Commissioner] Reding would have done better to treat the subject in private with French leaders before speaking publicly as she did.” Some of the right-leaning Italian press is calling it a new French-Italian “axis” against immigration. Meanwhile, the NYT does a story on the Rom, and the comment of a Romanian official bears a striking resemblance to a comment on this blog a couple weeks back.

More on the EU and the Roma

In response to reader Scott, who raises some good points on my last post:

Romania is near to being the most impoverished country in Europe, and if there are no jobs in Romania workers will go where the jobs are. I would label them economic refugees (forced migration through economic necessity).

First off, I’d draw a distinction between Romanians of Romanian descent (of which there are more than a few in Italy) and Romanians who claim Roma descent. The former group has certainly felt this, which is why the Romanian state funded an ad campaign in Italy called “Romania, piacere di conoscerti” (Romania, pleased to meet you) showing the positive contributions that Romanian transplants to the belpaese have made. Divisive, surely, but it did underline a difference that many Italians were failing to see.

However, I find it ironic that French taxpayer dollars are basically paying for Roma vacations. They are deported, go home to see family and friends, and then return to France where they are let right back in. Does that make any sense?

Secondly, you’re right about the lack of fiscal prudence in deporting undocumented immigrants. There’s doubtlessly something cosmetic about deportation; in the specific case of the LN in Italy, the very small number of deportations actually carried out is in inverse proportion to the media attention they’re given, which is of course healthy for the League’s populist base. I would wager that, given the poor showing of Sarkozy’s UMP party in recent regional election, that something similar might be going on in France. After all, isn’t deportation the ultimate failure of any meaningful immigration policy?

I also suspect that other world leaders are secretly jealous of the bravado of Sarkozy and Maroni, and wish they could enact such policies yet with an even more hardline stance.

Every politician wants to be seen as “tough on crime,” no matter who commits it (indigenous or migrant populations) – just look at the rising number of Americans behind bars for minor crimes, serving those multi-century sentences that were formerly reserved for triple-named celebrity serial killers. (The Economist recently ran an excellent piece on this.)

The state has always made it clear that there is no place for nomadism in industrialized nations.

But I’m unsure of your assertion that states necessarily frown on nomadism. Look at the empires created in medieval central Asia, the Chinese in southeast Asia, or, perhaps most germane to a Westerner, the Jews in Europe. And I don’t think the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and Gypsies were necessarily a product of statism per se.

At any rate, the presences of large groups of nomadic people in southeastern Europe – their economic needs and ability, their habits and culture – should not have been lost on the European Commission during the 18 years that Romania waited to join the EU. So I would rephrase your conditional that “If you’re going to deport someone, either ban them forever or don’t fly them out at all” to “if you’re going to let someone into your club, be prepared to deal with both their advantages and defects.” Europe has certainly been able to make good use of Romanian labor, but has failed to develop any kind of coherent policy other than deportation to deal with serial lawbreakers from within its own bloc – no matter what their ethnic affiliation is. At bottom, it is simply a measure of just how far Europe has to come to ever closer union.