The Roma in Canada: Emigration from Hungary from the Second Halfofthe 1990S1

A PDF fájlok elektronikusan kereshetőek. A dokumentum használatával elfogadom az Europeana felhasználói szabályzatát. 1I\\b\ - - .••F"•...• ', ~ '\ , I"\\ / / \ \ ,A,1·, \ / --~/ .•. ; --- tr: ,~~ .-<' - -' - - - ,~\ ~ _.. .'- '"I, , . , ,. I I• / ; r '\ \ \ \ " ROMA MIGRATION HOlDa Migration Budapest, 2002 Series editor: Endre Sik Editor of this volume: András Kováts The publication of this book was greatly facilitated by the generous help of 10M International Organization for Migration OIM Organisation Internationale pour les Migrations OIM Organización Internacional para las Migraciones Copyright © Bognár Katalin, Hajnal László Endre, Heil István, Kállai Ernő, Kováts András, Miklósi Gábor, Prónai Csaba, Vajda Imre, 2002 Photos © Hajnal László Endre, 2002 English translation © Dezső Bánki and Ákos Farkas, 2002 Published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Minority Research - Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies, Budapest, 2002 1014 Budapest, Országház u. 30. V 224-6700, 224-6790; fax: 224-6793 ISBN 963 009827 X Con ten ts Michael Stewart: Foreword 7 Kováts, András: Migration Among the Roma Population in Hungary 12 Vajda, Imre-Pronai, Csaba: Romanian Roma in Hungary: Beggars, Merchants, Workers. A Case Study 35 Hajnal, László Endre: The Roma in Can ada: Emigrationfrom Hungary from the second half of the 1990s 42 Miklási, Gábor: .u» Got to Go Through!" A Case Study 69 Kállai, Ernő: Gypsy Musicians 75 Heil, István: The Zámoly Roma - the Road Ended in Strasbourg 97 Bognár, Katalin-Kováts, András: The Migration of Roma as Reflected in the H ungarian Press 113 Reason or Abandonment. Report of the Monitoring Group ofthe Publicity Club on the Presentation of the Zámoly Roma Affair in the Hungarian Press 131 Kováts, András: The Opinion of the Hungarian Population on Roma Migration. A Research Report 138 Appendix Parliamentary Speeches related to Roma Migration. Compiled by András Kováts 149 The Chronology of Roma Migration as Based on Reports Published in the Hungarian Press Between June 1997 and April2001. Compiled by Katalin Bognár 181 Michael Stewart' Foreword In August 1998, just after the Schengen EU countries had promised to consider changing the visa requirements for Romanians, the satiricai Romanian weekly, Academia Catavencu, carried the headline: "Watch Out Swans of Europe, Here We Come!" The joke referred to an incident notorious within Romania at !east when Romanian migrants (of uncertain ethnic origin, but believed to be Roma by most Romanians) had been aceused of killing and roasting Viennese swans during a sojoum in the Austrian capital. In the face of the double standards, the hypocrisy, the bureaucratic nonsense and the sheer medieval thinking about migration issues in 'united Europe,' Academia Catavencu's sublime mockery may seem the only approach likely to cut through the horse shit. That is, until you receive a book like this one in your hands. For here, at last, is some well informed, solidly researched and soberly thought through analysis of migration in its economic, social, politicai and human contexts.? Of course, the occasion of the research was the local, Hungarian hoo-haa consequent on the 'flight/ migration' of the Zámoly Roma to Strasbourg (a politicai storm very helpfully documented from several diverse angles by several of the contributors here). But the research project has gone far beyond the confines of a debate shaped by a paranoid political rhetoric which now, as so often in the past, seeks to lay the blame for Hungary's miseries on some bloody foreigners aided by treacherous (former?) Hungarians now living abroad. It is fash- ionable to accuse social science of irremediable parti pris, but in this book we have a case in which true dividends are paid by even that minimal extra degree of objectivity which derives from a 'scientific/research' discourse. For, in the face of politicai strategies (on ali sides) that inevitably reduce and simplify social reality in order to mobilise constituencies, research such as this complicates and dissolves firm lines of demarcation. It takes no special foresight to see that because it does so, this book will be attacked from all sides in the hot house oftoday's Roma issue in Hungary. There are a number of general merits to this book. First, and foremost, it demolishes the simplistic suggestion that Hungarian Roma migration is either merely a response to 1 Michael Stewart is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, UCL, London and Recurrent Visiting Faculty CEU. 2 This book compares wonderfully with su ch eraven productions of the EU funded ICMPO, as Current Roma Migrationfrom the EU Candidate States, (February 2001) which, apart from adopting the simplistic economic reductionist explanations of migration puts on off er su ch inspired ideas as the extension of a 'benefits in kind for cash benefits' (p. 35) - ideas which have now been abandoned by the very governments (e.g. the British) which initiated them. 7 economic immiseration here and opportunities elsewhere or a product of de facto if not de jure persecution. (You will forgive me ifI leave aside the imaginative suggestion that it is a Jewish inspired conspiracy to undermine poor Hungary's international reputation.) This is an important issue because of the simplistic imagery which dominates much popular thinking about migration. There is an image in the western media (and not just in the popular, tabloid press) ofwesternlnorthern immigration policyacting like adam, blocking a great pent-up flow ofwould be migrants eager to flee from poverty to wealth. The reality, as 25 years of free movement of labour between Spain, Portugal, Greece and the northern countries of the EU has shown, is that 'even large differences in economic returns (measured by wages) are not sufficient to induce migration in most people' (Glover et al., 2001: 3). As Kováts notes in his introduction here, only 3-4% of the Hungarian population at large would consider working abroad and half that number entertain the idea of moving abroad per- manently. So, if larger numbers of Roma are migrating or considering migrating from Hungary than other Hungarian citizens, this is unlikely to be due to a simple calculation of wage differentials. The sad fact is that there is a growing tendency in Hungary for Roma to feel that Hungary is less and less a desirable place to live. And in Miklósi Gábor's presentation of one woman's asylum application we can see why. 'Maria's' story of aban- doning her job after pressure from the chief nurse and refusals by white Hungarians to be given injections by a 'Gypsy' rings horribly and bitterly true. Presented with an opportunity to move, the most ambitious, the most qualified and the most imaginative seem increasingly likely to make the leap into migration. Note, however, that this is not to bring on stage the journalistic image of 'Roma migration' as a general phenomenon character- ising ali Roma communities in Hungary. What this book offers is a rich picture of the extreme heterogeneity among Roma communities, families and individuals. As the research- ers show (Kállai, especially), many of those who might be expected to take advantage of migratory possibilities do not in fact do so. There are also numerous merits in the detail of the studies presented here. Of ali these excellent contributions, 1 would like in particular to highlight the ethnographic essays by Hajnal, Kállai and Vajda-Prónai. Hajnal's notion of the transnational migration network which has come into being between Canada and Hungary reminds me of strategies used in earlier centuries by other peoples who found themselves marginalised as the global divi- sion of labour changed shape. Take, for instance, the 17th and 18th century peddlers from the Alps, whose heroic migrations Laurence Fontaine has rescued from archival oblivion (Fontaine, 1996). Here was a population that found itself unable to sustain itself in its mountain redoubts, and launched itself into what even then can be called a transnational migration network, linking cities as far flung as Seville, Ghent and Lyons with the home village in the mountains. The crucial point of comparison is that in a world where towns still jealously reserved the right to settle and establish fixed businesses within their walls, these alpine adventurers were able to use mobility itself as a strategy to implant themselves in various markets and circumvent feudal restrictions. Something rather similar, 1 suspect, is happening with the Budapest entrepreneurs Hajnal describes: not so much an emigration from Hungary and an immigration into Canada, as a migration between. Not ali Roma people are weil adapted for such innovative strategies which involve an elaborate juggling and balancing of economic, legal and social possibilities. Leo Howe (1990) has shown with respect to Northern Ireland that a group's historicai relationship 8 with the state decisively shapes strategies in communities of the long-term unemployed. Other ethnographic investigations have demonstrated that ~ certain healthy disrespect for 'authority' is the sine qua non for survival as entrepreneurs at the bottom of the social pile (Pine, 1996: 140-147, 1998: 117). And it seems that it is the Roma families who were persecuted for longest as 'nomads' and 'vagrants' (that is the so-called Vlach Gypsies) who have maintained the most 'ambitious' stance vis a vis authorities and the state, and have managed to make the most of the new world order around them (see Stewart, 1997; Day-Papataxiarchis-Stewart, 1998). In stepping onto this ladder they find, as do others in the post-socialist world, that it helps to work with aradicai separation of the social world. "Trust and morality are implicit at the local level but do not extend to the wider society. Rather, the centre is viewed almost as a field of opportunity, in which gaps canbe located to pursue entrepreneurial dealings; these dealings are imbued with little or no sense of moral obligation, and there is little sense of shared identity with the centre' (Pine, 1998: 121).

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