Policy Implications for Addressing Roma Precarious Migration Through Employment at Home

Abstract

Roma migration from Romania is often precarious and takes place in circumstances that increase pre-existent levels of vulnerability. For many, migration is a last resort solution for navigating an insecure economic environment. For others, it has become a source of profit they draw upon, sometimes at the expense of the most vulnerable members of Roma communities. The major challenge this article addresses is how to create the enabling circumstances at home in order to provide alternatives to precarious migration for Roma. Informed by interviews with Roma migrants and with local authorities, this article examines the policy options at local level, addressing Roma precarious migration. It examines the limitations of the current employment policies in relation to Roma in order to identify what seem to work, what sounds promising and what does not work. It advises that job fairs and counselling campaigns are likely to fail, as they do not tackle the structural constraints keeping Roma outside the labour market. Unless linked with realistic employment opportunities, training courses also remain precarious strategies for labour market integration. The article also argues that individualized interventions (including repatriation schemes) are likely to increase community divides. The article supports structural, community-level measures for tackling unemployment and argues that future policies need to have Roma communities as the 'unit of intervention', because the social preconditions for migration are likely to be generated at this level. This policy proposal is grounded in the research finding that an apparently consistent group of Roma migrants, prone to deceitful recruitment and precarious migration, would endorse reasonable and stable economic solutions at home. Yet accepting that circular migration may be inevitable for a number of Roma is an important ingredient when designing policy interventions.

How television news disguises its racist representations: The case of Romanian Antena 1 reporting on the Roma

“…They were linked to organised crime (Van Baar, 2014) or became the scapegoats in the right-wing rhetoric which was used to muster nationalist sentiments or distract attention from other, pressing domestic issues (Fekete, 2014; Vidra and Fox, 2014; Wodak, 2015). In this context, the Roma suffered through controversial actions undertaken by various EU governments: forced evictions, repatriations from Germany, Belgium, France and Italy, visa entry restrictions in Finland, Norway and Denmark, practices which contradicted the European protocols 1 in reference to the treatment of European citizens (Amnesty, 2012a, 2012b; Breazu and Machin, 2018; ERRC, 2016; Korando, 2012; Pantea, 2013; Richardson and O’Neill, 2012). Within Romanian political and media discourse, these reactions were largely reported as understandable; there was even a sense of celebration, that other governments and EU citizens became more aware of the severe social problem and burden the Roma constituted (Breazu and Machin, 2018).…”

Roma within Obstructing and Transformative Spaces

“…While a focus on the local has been present in anthropological and sociological studies on Roma migration from Romania (Pantea, 2013b;Troc, 2012;Vlase and Voicu, 2014) as well as in policy suggestions (Pantea, 2013a), more attention has been paid to the pre-conditions and effects of migration within the Roma segments of the local population than to the broader local community and to the relationships between different local population segments (for notable exceptions, see: Anghel, 2016;Cingolani, 2012). In an earlier publication, we presented findings on Roma migration in relation to the general migratory patterns of the Romanians to address this limitation.…”

Persuading others: Young Roma women negotiating access to university

“…With a high unemployment rate and low levels of education, most Roma experience a general sense of disappointment, economic insecurity and low political trust. The rising levels of anti-Gypsism build on the image of Roma as 'welfare dependent' and 'abusers of the public-good' (Rat 2009) or as symbolically responsible for damaging the country's image abroad (Pantea 2013).…”