I kept wondering why there were so many references to Romanian immigrants in recent Spanish literature. And then I discovered the following information:
The top three immigrant groups in the EU are Turkish
(2.4 million), Moroccan (1.7 million), and Romanian (1.6 million).
Does anybody know why Romanians emigrate in such large numbers and not, say, Ukrainians, Poles, Slovenians, etc.?
Just a guess or two
A lot of them aren’t ethnic Romanians but Gypsies who have little attachment to places. Also in their drive to beat the gadjo system individual gypsies might be counted more than once (in different countries or multiple times in the same country). It’s not easy to fool western people with eastern names with odd spellings (which you can endlessly modify).
Romania started post-communist life in a worse place than any non-FSU country (besides Albania, maybe Bulgaria) and quickly developed similar crook-oligarch problems as Ukraine (possibly worse in percentage terms).
The collective trauma of the final Ceausescu years was worse than anything in the region (perhaps except for Albania*) certainly worse than the final CCCP years. A Polish friend who grew up in ‘crisis’ decades of communist rule is really into Herta Muller and was shocked by the conditions she describes, and she managed to miss the final couple of years.
Watch this movie, one of the definitive films on the post-communist experience.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0809407/
Some time in the mid 90’s while living in a teachers dorm I met a couple of Romanians who had been university lecturers and finally decided to leave (they were in Poland on the way to somewhere else) they said all of the people they knew ten years previously had already left.
This is different from Poland where those leaving are either working class whose jobs disappeared or young graduates of university programs that don’t actually provide any skills (such as marketing).
I’ve been to Bucuresti a few times and while it’s a great city it feels like going back 15 years (at least) in time from Poland.
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You’ve used a rather nasty slur for the Roma there. I hope that was only lack of knowledge.
While there are lots of Roma immigrating (and no wonder, either – the way they were and are treated in Romania is obscene, and I can’t blame any of them for having little attachment to it), they certainly aren’t the most of 1.6 mil (a number that seems a bit on the low side for me, if anything). There were also multiple emigration waves – the mid 90’s you describe was mostly intelligentsia profoundly disappointed by the perceived failure of the revolution (all the people those lecturers would classify as “people we knew, and who we’d stay in the country for” would also be intelligentsia, so you can have a situation like that without losing a too large number of the population), whereas the post-EU-integration emigration is a much more cross-class affair. There’s absolutely *huge* numbers of people who immigrated to Italy or Spain either a) because their working-class jobs disappeared or b) because their middle-class jobs paid pennies and earned them little respect, so they might as well take a working-class job in the West that pays enough money to earn them some respect from the relatives back home. Young graduates of university programs are also leaving – generally, though, these are programmers, doctors and the like*. Also, many kids go abroad for university (a much better class of education, after all) and of those who do, many tend to stay.
*The one exception I know was in the final year of a Japanese major/Spanish minor degree before a conflict with the university that meant that,at best, she’d have graduated one year later convinced her to abandon that degree, work as an au pair in the West for a couple years (time in which she took whatever Japanese literature/culture courses she could find there) and come back home with both the funds to start undergrad again at a different university.
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I’ve known gypsies and been a guest in their houses and they’ve been guests in mine and I’ve never heard them say anything but ‘gypsy’ (with either pride or shame).
I’m very unimpressed by the PC campaign to rebrand them (and by chance or on purpose confuse them with ethnic Romanians). The purpose of pretty much all PC renaming is to confuse people and dumb them down.
An yes, they’ve been repressed, but let’s not romanticise too much, they’re actively against almost all non-gypsy education, integration into the larger society and many kinds of work and whatever productive economic niche they had (as tinkerers and entertainment) has long disappeared. They’re economic base is begging, rigging the system and stealing…. and they’re okay with that as long as they can maintain their own identity.
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If people don’t like the word, I’m perfectly fine with not using it. In Russia and Ukraine, the Roma people refer to themselves as “tsygane” and they are very proud of their culture and being who they are. Soviet authorities made efforts to integrate the tsygane into a sedentary lifestyle. This worked in some cases. We knew a family that had left the nomadic lifestyle (tabor) and lived like everybody else. But many tsygane didn’t and still live the traditional lifestyle. There was a certain respect of their traditions (very early marriages, resisting conscription, lack of “propiska”, which is an official residence, etc). Of course, there is a lot of nasty prejudice against tsygane. And a lot of fear that always accompanies an encounter with somebody very different.
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I just read this fascinating article about Moroccan and Romanian female immigrants in Spain. Moroccan women immigrants are a lot less likely to work (48% to Romanian 94%) but when they do, they are a lot better paid than Romanian women in the same jobs.
In the article I’m writing right now, I will be discussing Romanian immigrants. I identify strongly with these Romanian characters because I get them a lot better than Ukrainians or Russians. To me, that’s unexpected because I don’t know much about the country and the people.
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Of course, I’m talking not of actual Romanians but of Romanian characters created by Spanish writers. However, there might be something to this depiction of Romanians because Stille, one of my favorite commenters, is Romanian and I really get her. So this is very interesting.
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Not an expert on the subject, but I’m Romanian. Looking at GDPs per capita of EU countries, Polish and Slovenian people earn twice what Romanians earn, in average (not speaking about Ukrainians since, not being in the EU, they’d have a tougher time working in western EU countries). Presumably, the costs are similarly higher, so while a Romanian working a low-paid job in Spain or Italy earns barely enough to be able to support their family back at home or save up for a house, the same wouldn’t be true for, say, a Slovenian. We also had our industrial sector pretty much dismantled in the ’90s, so the sort of jobs that’d have been available to people with a highschool diploma are for the most part just not there anymore. Most Romanians who immigrate also go to Spain or Italy, whose languages are easy to learn for us (I don’t know any Italian, for example, but when I visited Italy I could understand people with just a little effort) and whose cultures are easy to adjust to – similar levels of sociability, openness etc (note that there aren’t that many Romanians emigrating to the UK, for example, even if almost everyone under 35 in Romania speaks some English). There’s also this attitude around here that, while one can live a decent life in Romania, it’ll be less than one could acquire with similar effort elsewhere (both because of the financial differences and because not living in a post-communist society, with all its attendant pathologies, has its benefits). I can probably talk more about the subject – again, from the perspective of a Romanian who’s no expert on immigration, so what I’ll be best at is describing attitudes towards immigration that I’ve heard – but now it’s breakfast time and you’re probably asleep anyway, so I’ll stop here and give you a chance to ask some questions.
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“Roma” is a label for an ethnic group derived from that ethnic group’s core language. “Gypsy” (“Egyptian”, originally) and other place name variants are labels used by people outside that ethnic group for that ethnic group.
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I posed this question to a Rumanian colleague in my department. He said it is because the language barrier is less for Rumanians moving to Italy or Spain than for the natives of the other countries you mentioned.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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