Europe's oldest integration challenge

In a post-9/11 world, the discourse on minority integration in Europe is dominated by the continent’s relatively new Muslim immigrants, with headscarf and burqa bans having emerged as the issue’s most emotive symbols.
But Europe also faces a much older integrationist challenge, one that persists unresolved over hundreds of years: the Roma. The Roma or gypsies as they are pejoratively also known, are linguistically and ethnically related to north Indians. It’s believed they left their homeland during the 11th century for reasons that remain debated, possibly a result of Muslim invasions. They never returned.


Today the Roma are estimated to number between two million and five million, the majority of whom live in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania. As new member states of the European Union, the citizens of these Eastern European countries now enjoy freedom of movement across the 27-nation bloc. As a result, the Roma are increasingly moving to the richer countries of Western Europe where despite the ingrained rhetoric of human rights, they find themselves as unwelcome as ever.

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