Around and Around

Abstract

Asylum-seeking and significant out-migration have been the response of many Roma communities who continue to face multiple insecurities in their everyday lives, leaving them to their own survival devices. This work seeks to understand how we approach and categorize realities of such internal and cross-border displacements of Roma in current day Hungary. Drawing from an interdisciplinary field of mobilities and borders scholarship, this paper advances the concept of border regimes to approach intersecting regimes of movement control and the dynamics of mobility and enclosure at local and transnational levels. This lens is translated in the case of protracted Roma family evictions, and their struggles with an externalized border regime in the city of Miskolc, Hungary. Fieldwork accounts and snapshots, deriving from on-going ethnographic research in the city’s ‘Numbered Streets’, Roma-populated, residential neighborhood will provide the premises for empirical investigation.

Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire?

“…Despite the new legislation, Hungarian Roma have been continuing their transnational mobility towards Canada, facilitated by their well embedded social ties, kinship networks, and also through their strategy of spreading news through their networks about new possibilities and how to navigate a shifting refugee system. 9 An important part of the rumours distributing in the last few years, since the introduction of the Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA), which serves as another device in the new mobility regime that impedes the mobility of unwanted refugees/migrants (Ciaschi, 2018), is to advise new migrants which route they should take on their way to Canada. From Peteri, there were a few Roma families who were taken off their flights (despite their valid tickets and ETA) in a transit country (among others in Amsterdam and in Frankfurt) by Canadian emigration officers, without any acceptable explanation.…”