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The idea for this book stemmed from two symposia that brought together scholars from a range of different countries and disciplines to reflect upon the political and legal context of the mobility of Romani citizens in Europe. Our interest in this topic started with the adoption of a EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies in 2011, when Member States were requested to develop integration strategies that were explicitly yet not exclusively targeted at their Roma populations (European Commission 2011). Even though this policy scheme represented an effort to overcome the inadequacies of the anti-discrimination directives to address the social and institutional discrimination suffered by Roma people in Europe, tangible results of such measures have so far been lacking. The symposia, titled “Roma Westward Migration in Europe: Rethinking Political, Social, and Methodological Challenges”, addressed the emergence of Roma-specific policies alongside an increasing concern about migration and diversity management. The drive to bring together different disciplinary and methodological approaches to “Roma migration” in Europe, and to explore how such phenomenon has been narrated, policed, politicized or ignored was – and is – rooted in four main considerations. Firstly, we are convinced that putting the focus squarely on the so-called “Roma westward migration” and problematizing the assumptions that underpin such a label contributes to uncover the structural inconsistencies of the European “Roma integration” framework and to question its overall political approach. Secondly, the intersections and overlaps between the categories of “Roma” and of “migrants” show how the classifications of deservingness and of access to welfare resources have shifted in recent years, making explicit the under-studied link between inclusive and securitarian policies. Thirdly, we believe that “Roma migration” provides a unique testing ground to understand how those portrayed as “the others” in contemporary Europe cope and develop counter-strategies in a system in which their options are limited. Fourthly and finally, we strongly support ethnographic accounts as a useful means to evaluate public policies at the local level, as they offer rich data that cannot be captured by national statistics or by surveys alone.

This chapter provides a critical overview of research trends on “Roma migration” as they developed over the last decade, contextualizing the issue and setting the stage for the following chapters. Due to the alleged increase in the number of Roma individuals exercising their mobility rights from Eastern European countries to Western Europe –mainly after the 2004 and 2007 EU accession – researchers’ interest has shifted towards this new topic. Many scholars have started focusing in the past decade on the causes and consequences of Roma’s migration patterns, their life in the new countries, and the legal, citizenship and policy questions posed by the appearance of non-Western Roma in Western Europe. Although Romani studies have long been in the constructivist paradigm, “Roma migration” has spurred new tendencies to essentialise Roma groups, at least in political and public debates. This chapter reflects on the conceptual and methodological aspects of researching “Roma migration”. This main question will be addressed through the following sub-questions: What kind of analytical and conceptual tools do researchers employ in order to understand the current migration trends of Roma citizens? What approaches do we adopt, and how do we use ‘old’ concepts, such as “Roma” or “migrant”? In this chapter I also raise the issue of research ethics and of the responsibility of researchers during the processes of knowledge-production on “Roma migration”.

This contribution explores the adequacy of EU action with regard to the Roma. The expulsion of large numbers of Roma individuals, accompanied by other discriminatory practices and forms of hostility, exclusion and violence against the Roma across Europe, has brought the attention of the media and policy makers to Roma issues to a greater extent than ever before during the last decade. The range of problems still afflicting the lives of many Roma individuals nowadays is extremely wide, well researched and profusely documented. This contribution leaves aside issues related to free movement and EU citizenship, thus moving the debate beyond the narrow framework of the ‘migrant Roma’. This contribution considers the wide range of relevant EU competences in this field, and assesses how comprehensive and appropriate the EU’s approach to Roma issues is. The analysis combines legal instruments, policy papers, and case law, draws from legal and non-legal literature, and integrates considerations of a social, economic and cultural nature. In the process, this contribution considers themes that cut across several strands of the EU’s Roma policy, including fundamental rights, intercultural sensitivity, the limits of the ‘integration model’, and issues of enforcement, monitoring and funding. The logical narrative developed puts together the key jigsaw pieces that currently contribute to an EU Roma policy, and clearly identifies the limitations of the present state of affairs. Finally, this contribution interrogates the trends underlying the development of the EU Roma policy and puts forward a range of recommendations.

Roma populations have been part of European societies for centuries, yet they started to be perceived as a European “issue” in occasion of the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargement. In Eastern Europe several Roma, already struggling to cope with critical living conditions, fell into an ever-more negative spiral of deprivation as a result of the transition to an open market economy. The accession to the European Union eased internal migration of Roma from Central and Eastern Europe and triggered the emergence of problems associated with service provision of shelter, education and health. Meanwhile, those who found themselves in severe marginalized situations and could not afford to migrate began to be regarded as a “problem” for local authorities. The European Union has taken several soft policy actions to establish a framework for Roma integration, and has conditioned the use of structural funds to said strategies. The difficulty of implementing the National Roma Integration Strategy and of investing integration funds at the local level is however heavily affected by the lack of administrative capacity, political will, and practical obstacles. This chapter describes the EU efforts made in this field, focusing on the need to involve the local level through the concrete case of the ROMACT programme.

The increase in migration flows within and into Europe has been accompanied by a growing policy focus on migration management. As in any policy debate, actors mobilise both factual claims and assumptions about the problems to be tackled and the population groups involved, in turn fashioning narratives that shape concrete policies. The article focuses on the policy narratives that developed in the UK around the migration of Roma groups between 2009 and 2014. I will show how the mobilisation of narratives on the criminal nature of Roma migration and about a sudden influx of Roma matched stereotypical images about the ‘Gypsies’. This made both narratives convincing as they fitted expectations about the Roma, to the point that their weak factual basis was ignored. This, in turn, contributed to refocusing the UK debate on migration from the need to reform the benefit system, to the need to reduce migration overall and eventually challenging the EU principle of freedom of movement. I will highlight the role of scholarly research in contributing to the development of policy narratives, calling for scholars to avoid sensationalising our findings, even if this is seen as an attempt to gain support for inclusive migration policies.

In November 2011 the Italian Council of State declared unlawful the state of emergency concerning Roma settlements that had been in force since 2008. This decision gave rise to a new political phase, which started in 2012, characterized by a new National Strategy for the Inclusion of Roma people. One year later, in the city of Turin, the still unspent financial resources that had been assigned to the ‘emergency’ were converted into funds for ‘Roma inclusion’. This chapter addresses the question of how the implementation of the National Strategy at the local level was influenced by the so-called ‘Roma emergency’ politics. Through fieldwork in the informal slum of Lungo Stura Lazio, which has turned into the biggest rehousing project ever implemented in the city, called La Città Possibile (The Possible City) we were able to detect the persistence of an emergency, punitive and strongly selective logic at work, applied to a neoliberal approach to housing policies. The role played by local NGOs has been particularly significant in the reproduction of this logic, through the arbitrary selection between “good” (deserving) and “bad” (undeserving) Roma. The investigation was carried out between 2011 and 2016 and is based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 25 camp dwellers, 12 civil servants, 11 social workers from private NGOs, and 4 civil-society actors from grassroots movements.

This chapter engages with the current debate on Romani mobility and Spanish state practices of implementing socio-educational programs and camp housing to migrant EU citizens. Taking the Madrid city as a case study, this chapter documents and analyses temporary devices of governance that both limit and force the mobility of Romani families from Romania. Implemented by local authorities through specific policies, temporary devices of governance deliver an enforced pressure on Romani migrants who are seen as prospective “failed” subjects of integration and potential returnees. While deterring migrants from accessing territorial social benefits, local authorities and private companies acting as state proxi assign Romani families a “social contract” that aims for their integration. The authorities not only implement problematic policies, but they interpret and label the mobility of Romani as a characteristic of their “provisional” way of living and dwelling. Following Cabot (2012) and Ringel (2016) on the temporality of governance and scholarship on the anthropology of time (Munn 1992; Fabian 2014), I aim to show two entangled processes in local governance: the subject formation of Romani migrants as an ethnicized mobile minority , and the long-term adverse results of project-based, profit-oriented social work. Romani migrants have become the target of a new type of social engineering by bringing into question the establishment of citizenship: agreeing to the social contract not only presumes that Romani migrants are not members of the same community, but also suggests that their lives have a different temporality.

The chapter looks into the socio-material production and regulation of the ethno-political figure of the “Roma beggar” through the prism of a regime-of-(im)mobility approach. Based on an ethnographic study, core aspects of this regime for “Roma beggars” are analysed on a micro-scale: criminalizing transport, invisibilising borders, educating beggars, victimization, stillness and deportability. The study investigates the everyday social and physical infrastructures and logistics for (im)mobility, imaginaries of (im)mobility and discursive technologies. It shows how a differentiated, rationalized knowledge on “them” is produced. “Roma beggars” are constituted as an epistemic object and policy target, legitimizing the unequal treatment of people in the name of security. The related regime-of-(im)mobility derives its effectiveness precisely from its in-built arbitrariness and inconsistency. The key insight is that the “stilled, able beggar” is the only legitimate form of begging in the light of a community of good and able citizens. As this figure is practically unrealizable and deceptive, it flips into the “Roma beggar”. The chapter concludes that this “stilled-Other of the citizen” is a discursively activatable and materially stabilized aspect of the Otherness operating within the concept of citizenship itself. Hence, the regime-of-(im)mobility for “Roma beggars” turns out to be an integral part of regimes that enable differential movements and forms of (im)mobile existences among all kinds of people.

This chapter critically examines the discourse on “Roma exclusion” in the context of European migration policy, presenting key findings from the case study of Romanian Roma migrants in a city of Wroclaw in Poland. The concept of “Roma exclusion” has come to dominate political discussions about the marginalization of the largest European minority. Placed at the centre of the European Union political agenda it recognized that Roma poverty has multiple and interrelated causes, which require multifaceted policy responses. Nevertheless, while the concept has acquired strategic connotations, by stressing socio-economic processes, it has remained open to different interpretation influenced by political perceptions of Roma identity, migration as well as domestic policy approaches to integration. The pivotal instability in the discourse concerns the question of whether exclusion entitles an individual or a group to seek opportunities through migration and whether receiving countries are obliged to provide necessary support. Building on equality scholarship, this chapter argues that portrayal of Roma as “welfare migrants” who move across Europe exploiting generosity of welfare states, legitimizes hostile public interventions that negate official commitments to the Free Movement principle. The case of Wroclaw has received unprecedented political and media attention and demonstrates that anti-Gypsy discourse is used to mask unwillingness and inability of the state to design and implement coherent migration strategies, reflective of the European principles and recommendations. It also shows that “migration panic” is equally strong in the new EU members, largely unprepared to act as receiving countries.

Based on a critical ethnographic research, this paper aims to reflect on the role of welfare surveillance and outsourced social services in migration procedures of Central European Roma. After the fifth EU Enlargement in 2007, transnational mobility has become a significant challenge for all western governments. As full EU citizens, large Roma populations now enjoy freedom of movement in Europe. The long standing prejudiced perception of Roma as profiteers unwilling to integrate became a basis for concerns about a “threatening flood” of Roma westward. As a result, several old Member States have introduced different control strategies allegedly to ensure security, legitimating excessive policing and surveillance of migrants in order to isolate them from national consensus. The “mechanisms” applied for sorting and excluding unwanted Roma communities are grounded in a set of punitive rules enacted through national and local legislation with the purpose of expulsion. Accordingly, limiting access to social services gradually replaced migration policies as a new process of selection regarding undesired European migrants from A8 countries. Service providers in the neoliberal bureaucratic social fields introduced new modalities of surveillance and restrictions to deny income assistance, benefit entitlement and legal aid. This chapter provides an empirical analysis on the effects of these sorting measures and on how the targeted groups either comply or circumnavigate these regulations in London.