Romanian Roma migration: the interplay between structures and agency

Abstract

Prior studies on Roma migration put much emphasis on either structural factors or networks that become key elements for explaining the growing migration flows of a population lacking economic resources and characterized by poor education. Although very relevant for explaining the perpetuation of migration, these studies posit the limit of downplaying migrants' agency and the role of identity markers mediating the influence of structural conditions in both destination and origin countries. Drawing on quantitative data from the Roma Inclusion Barometer (2006) as well as on in-depth interviews with Roma migrants from Eastern Romania, the paper provides a more comprehensive account of contemporary Romanian Roma migration towards Western European countries. The paper challenges the portrayal of the Roma migrant population, as conveyed by many scholars, as a rather passive one and argues that gender, religion and subgroup identities constitute key elements in explaining Roma migrants' agency.

Keywords:

• Roma migration
• agency
• structures
• gender
• religion
• neam

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Camelia Badea for her contribution to the translation of interview excerpts, and to Maria-Carmen Pantea, Cosima Rughiniş and anonymous Ethnic and Racial Studies reviewers for their helpful comments.

Funding

This work was supported by CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0602: Recasting migrants' voices: local perspectives on migration, development, and social change in Romania’; and grant number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0210: ‘Social change under the impact of international migration: value patterns, civic and political participation, life satisfaction’.

Notes

1. A neam may be understood as a family clan or, following recent studies on Roma in Romania, as:

a group based on common social institutions and a certain degree of consanguinity, maintained by intermarriage. Members of a particular neam often share similar occupations, a mother tongue, religion or social position, which has led to many attempts at scholarly classifications of neamuri based on such criteria. (Rughiniş 2010, 346, original emphasis)

2. Estimates of Romanian Roma vary greatly according to various sources. Crowe (2010, 87) mentions between 1.4 million and 2.5 million out of an estimated total of 9 or 10 million Roma in Europe (Bancroft 2001), while provisional data from the latest population census (November 2011) shows only 619,000 Roma in Romania (about 3.2 per cent of the country's population). Rughiniş (2010) discusses in detail the problems raised by records of Roma in surveys and census data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ionela Vlase

IONELA VLASE is Sociologist in the Department of Political Sciences at Babeş-Bolyai University (UBB).

Mălina Voicu

MĂLINA VOICU is Sociologist at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.