Before I started writing this post, I had forgotten that the US did this to incoming (non-immigrant) Muslims after 9/11.

The US now does this to incoming anyone, since August 2004. There are multiple reasons why I will not visit the US any more, but this is one of them: I’m damned if I’ll visit a country that treats me as a criminal suspect merely because I want to enter it.

NPR tonight the presenter discussed an Italian Jew who brought in her Mussolini-era registration card and compared it to the Roma registration cards being issued today.

Many people forget that the Roma were also targeted in WW2.  Somewhere between 220,000-500,000 Roma were killed (although estimates seem to vary wildly from 90,000 to 1.5 million), which is a huge number proportionally, and they were also subject to the ghettos

By some estimatesm, a higher percent of the Roma in Europe were killed than Jews by the Nazis. The stuff mentioned here sounds exactly like what happened then (this is how it all started). Shouldn’t this be on front pages everywhere?

JohnL: No, because the Romas and the Jews were reviled historically and no one batted an eye that a government would take steps to protect its honest, hardworking citizens from the greedy, thieving classes. It wasn’t on the front page then, so it’s not on the front page now. The apologists say “we’re not racist, we’re just trying to secure our safety from foreigners who don’t respect our way of life.” The only difference is that the Jews have largely overcome this racism, and the Roma, not so much.

Wasn’t there a scene in Triumph of the Will that shows a “dirty gypsy woman” begging and pickpocketing a good German couple?

It’s astonishing how naked the anti-Roma bias is among Europeans and even among American expats living in Europe. And they’ll always explain that it’s totally different from garden-variety racism, because the Gypsies “all” steal, refuse to integrate with the rest of society, etc. It’s warranted, they say. Makes my head spin to hear it all.

The US now does this to incoming anyone, since August 2004. There are multiple reasons why I will not visit the US any more, but this is one of them: I’m damned if I’ll visit a country that treats me as a criminal suspect merely because I want to enter it.

Jesu, I agree with you, but you do know that as a British citizen, you’re eligible for the visa waiver program and thus will not need to be fingerprinted if you want to visit the US.  Right?

Orange, I don’t think it’s all that astonishing. In fact, I think that anti-roma sentiment is very understandable.

The fact of the matter is that groups of Roma, mostly women and children, plague bus and train stations all over southern Europe. And they will steal your shit. And they do it in ways that make you despair for humanity.

I spent 3 months in 2000 wandering Italy, Southern France and Germany. Pack on the back, not much money to speak of. I tried to learn a little language, and I tried not to be the loud American. And it was a great time, and I met a lot of cool kids from all over doing the same thing. Liberal Americans, liberal Australians, and liberal Europeans. And they all HATED the Roma, as I did by the end of my trip. I only got actually robbed the first 2 times, but it happened damn near every time I walked out of a bus or train or metro station. And it was a nearly universal experience; a group of women and kids, and women holding kids, would give you the bum rush, begging up a cachophany, and while you tried to process what was happening, they would go through everything you had.

They reached INSIDE my pants. Not just in my pockets. But IN MY FUCKING pants. More than once, these women would offer to sell me their kids. Take a minute to think about that.

So, widespread anti-roma bias? I get it.

Now; before you all roast me to death, I do not support the Italian plan to register all Roma, or the plans to wall them off, or the plans, currently in practice, all over northern Europe to just not let them in. I have no idea how to deal with this problem. But it is a problem.

And for you guys to just sit here and moan that this great wellspring of hatred coming out of nowhere is silly. To deny that the culture that the Roma have developed over the centuries has something to do with how they are perceived is folly.

And it also shows that you have never been in the middle of a pack of thieves with their hands all over you desperately trying to remember how to say ‘stop’ or ‘help’ in Italian.

Keep in mind that lots of Gypsies/Roma are born and raised completely outside the system. Everyone has a right to have their birth and their right to be in a country recorded and registered for all time, so it will never be held in doubt or taken away from them. I’ve always been a bit revulsed by Europe’s penchant for forcing everyone to carry around national identity cards, but all Roma legally born and raised in their own country should be able to have the documentation that allows them to claim the full rights of citizenship without question.

Also, what tripp said.

The characteristics which make the Roma so intolerable to European governments ought to make them heroes to the American Right: strong family values, carefully-preserved tradition, disdain for national governments and even for the very concept of citizenship, much less of civic duty.

Well Tripp, I am glad that on your 3 month backpacking experience you became an expert on all things Roma. Good for you.
Just kidding. I call bullshit.
I’ve had half a mind to steal shit from entitled tourists myself, just to prove a point.

I second Tripp’s experience. I spent three months in Spain and had the same experience with Gypsies. I was studying at Salamanca and wasn’t your garden-variety tourist.

BTW, Yazi, I live on Maui and know a lot of folks who think just like you—and make their living off stealing from ‘entitled tourists’. They’re all shit.

Tripp and Temporis: My friends were mugged by a black dude a few years back. There are those who say that black dudes are naturally more disposed to violent crime. Would you suggest that we start mandating that all black dudes in America get a card to identify themselves, and maybe start removing their children from the homes of black dudes? I’m just curious.

I would also say that if you can’t get through a European train station without being pickpocketed, I can promise that you are not nearly as savvy a traveler as you seem to think that you are.     

But, yeah, blame it on the locally othered minority.  Way to go!

The Opoponax—agreed. I travelled Europe for three months after college and never had my pocket picked.

Avoiding pick pockets and muggers is part luck, part preparation.  Don’t look vulnerable, don’t be vulnerable.  I’ve been coached closely by my parents and by tour guides (and by martial arts teachers) on thief avoidance.  Some things make you stand out and make you look vulnerable.  A big bag of any kind, especially backpacks, nose in a guidebook are like targets in some places. Being American doesn’t help either, the stereotypes always include “rich.”  I don’t mean to side against Tripp and temporis.  I believe tripp’s story.  I believe that a disproportionate number of Roma commit crimes, but that’s not a reason to hate Roma.  That’s a reason to learn to watch your back.

Okay, this is a totally random thought and I hope it doesn’t come out wrong, but most of these stories that I hear about tourists being rushed and pickpocketed in Europe seem to happen to men.  Is it because the wallet is more accessible than trying to get inside a purse?  Am I just not seeing the stories from women?  Is this a specific strategy by thieves?

Hm. Let’s say that a group of whites enslaved my ancestors and created a system of organized rape for them. Then when that got tiresome, a group of whites created an apartheid system for them. Then, after the formal system was abolished, a much more socially useful economic discrimination system remained in place, encouraged by an even larger group of whites, which hurts people of my background now.

Then there’s this white guy I know who sent some of my kin to die in a war, just so he could get his rocks off.
Then he spied on me.

Thus, due to this pattern of wrongdoing from groups of and individual whites, I conclude that all whites should be rounded up into internment camps. QED.

Oh, and let’s note that the harms done by whites to minorities (not just blacks) benefit a MUCH wider number of whites than a couple of gypsies robbing one tourist, so the number of white participants in theft (say, in a last-hired, first-fired racist society) is greater than the number of gypsy participants in muggings, both in an absolute and per capita basis. And whites have stolen WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more stuff than gypsies in the last—oh, fuck, just name your time period, I win. And we all know, though I’m not serious about rounding white people up into camps (could you imagine the traffic? Horrible to contemplate), that the majority ethnic group is always going to beat out the minorities when it comes to crime simply because the majority has more means with which to do crime.

That’s how you know you’re making a racist argument: it applies more powerfully to the majority race than to the minority it targets.

But, hey, it’s not like Italians, in particular and as a people, have a history of monstrous immorality as compared to the gypsies—oh, wait.

To Tripp - Aiuto, Aiuto!! (eye-you-toe) = Help, Help! in Italian
Aidez-moi (A-day-moi, A being long) = French

Yes, gypsies/Roma can be annoying to deal with, even in the USA. Try dealing with a large extended family all trying to see their patriarch in the ICU - at the same time - what part of “you won’t ALL fit in there, take turns” don’t they understand?

At the same time, the current trend to begging and petty theft has more to do with lack of other opportunities available to or familiar and culturally acceptable to gypsies/Roma. They are the ghetto minority of much of Europe. The old trades of migrant farm worker, hand metalworker, horse dealer, musician and entertainer, and so on are gone. Some adapt to dealing in used cars, import items, and so on in bazaars and maybe soon on Euro-Craigs List / E-Bay. The general level of education is low both because the schools discourage their enrollment or else provide poor-quality segregated schools, and because the age of social maturity, and thus the assumption of breadwinner/husband and mother/housewife roles, is usually 14 to 16 for the boys and menarche for the girls. Often the girls are taken out of school around 9 or 10 years of age, to learn housewifery from their mothers. Children are considered potential laborers from the age that they can follow directions, and if the family is poor enough, school of any kind is strictly optional. The traditional customs and attitudes don’t fit in well with the condition of modern employment in midsized or large organizations.

However dysfunctional a subculture of a minority, civilized people don’t try to eliminate them or throw citizens out of their own country. There may be attempts to ameliorate problems, find mutually satisfactory, decent economic niches for them, provide adequate education for job qualification and citizenship, and lock up the violent criminals. (Americans ought not to be smug - we lock up poor blacks for victimless crimes, and a whole lot of people would be glad to have hard-core ghetto residents fall off the face of the earth.) Talk of fingerprinting the gypsies/Roma sounds like the sort of work done by the Nazi eugenicists before the decision was made to throw them all into The Final Solution.

Following up NancyP, here’s some of the history of Roma in Europe:

the were slaves in parts of Romania until 1864;
countries alternated between trying ethnic cleansing and forcing them to assimilate (more than a few countries took away Roma children, for example Norway took away 1500 children during the 1900’s);
when the eugenics movement started, Roma were sterilised (it was part of official policy in Norway until 1977 and Czechoslovakia until 1990 with evidence that it was still going on unofficially as late as 2004 in both Slovakia and the Czech Republic);
this culminated in the attempted genocide by Nazis.

And it’s not like the discrimination is gone now:

a 2005 EU report found that Roma were the grouup most likely to endure discrimination;
as NancyP noted, countries such as Romania and Croatia force Roma to go to separate schools or classrooms (you won’t be surprised to learn they’re also inferior) or remedial classes);
Roma are among the poorest groups in most of Europe.

It’s not surprising then that they don’t trust governments in Europe. And now Italy has started to use some of the same methods and rhetoric as the Germans did in the early 1900’s that helped lead to the Holocaust. I find it very scary

yazikus and opononax, I’m afraid tripp is not talking rubbish. I lived in central Rome for 5 years,
and I don’t know or care what ethnicity the pickpockets/thieves are, or how representative
they are of whatever ethnicities they are, but they are a pain in the ass. whilst they
“pickpocket” in the sense of taking stuff without you noticing, they’re also quite happy
to just walk up to you and take stuff, relying on the fact that you’re probably too nice
to punch out 10 year-old children.

I’ve seen them just walk up to Japanese tourists and take their stuff openly, and rob
someone in a wheelchair, because, hey, what was he/she going to do?

Mnemosyne:

around Termini railway station in Rome, and near tourist spots like the Colosseum,
I would often see groups of distinctively-dressed women and children who would hold up
newspapers (to anyone) or babies (mostly to female victims). The idea seems to be that
while you are looking at this newspaper or baby thinking “why is this person holding
up this item?” they other six or so take your stuff.

My _impression_ is that if you clearly know who they are, they will look for
easier prey.

I should admit that this is what I saw happening quite a few (10+) years ago now. I’ve not
been to Rome recently, but I’ve seen much the same thing in Florence in the last year or two
and don’t imagine Rome has changed.

I don’t know about Tripp’s “all over southern Europe”, but maybe that’s because I’ve not
been to very many places. I don’t recall noticing them in (say) Pisa or Palermo, but
I haven’t been to tourist areas in those.

Would you suggest that we start mandating that all black dudes in America get a card to identify themselves, and maybe start removing their children from the homes of black dudes?

You have a point, but Tripp has one, too - black Americans don’t have a centuries-old culture that stresses transiency, grifting, and petty theft as the only acceptable lifestyle.

Gypsies kind of do. I had a couple of Romany youngsters rifle through my pack on the Paris metro, and when they moved on (I had nothing of value) I noticed that they were being trained to do that by their adult sibling.

Sure, there’s not a lot of legitimate employment available to gypsies. Partly that’s because holding steady, skilled employment and actually trying to become a functional member of Western society is something that your gypsy family will disown you for.

Sorry, but nobody’s charming ethnic background gives them a right to operate organized crime. (And I’m an Italian-American saying that.) I don’t know if police-state ID cards are the answer, but we’re talking about a massive, indigent population with a marked propensity for crime. What else are they supposed to do? Ignore it?

In the town I live in (Long Beach, California…  twenty miles South of L.A.) the police just announced that they’re flagging all arrests of gypsies so they can start a database of them in our area.  It isn’t like they’re being issued cards or anything, but yeah, the people in charge are starting to take a headcount.

How is it not child abuse to use your kids in a criminal enterprise? That’s obviously what the Roma do.

People on the visa waiver program get fingerprints taken on entry into the US.

My cousin is a policeman in Italy.  He’s a very sweet guy who’s also very street smart.

He states, with complete confidence, that the majority of all robberies in Italy could be stopped by cooping up the Roma.

You know what? I believe him, ‘cuz he has no reason to lie.

Chet, Tripp, and Entomologista speak uncomfortable truths, but truths all the same. I don’t know what a society could do in this situation with the exception of a major crackdown (on pickpocketing) with incarceration of offenders and attempts to rehabilitate minors.

No one here is not suggesting thieves should not be prosecuted. If someone picks your pocket, or uses their children to pick your pocket, hell yes they should be arrested, prosecuted, and the kids should be placed in state care.

But maybe it’s a little fucking racist to assume that all Roma are pickpocketing, child-abusing, tourist-preying lowlifes.

Those truths aren’t uncomfortable, Paul. Just half-assed.

As others have pointed out, the Roma are deliberately kept on the fringes of society by the majority. And some of them have created a culture of crime.

Clearly, the majority could treat them like human beings, give them a stake in society and cause their culture to split between those who hold onto the criminal lifestyle (the only choice the government gave them before) and those who choose to accept true citizenship without—this is important—without cultural compromises save for any criminal leanings.

But, hey, maybe Italy is right. I suppose, by that logic, we should decimate the Italians here. The Mafia is FAR more dangerous than a bunch of street urchins. Let’s say a bullet in the back of the head of every tenth Italian—that would wake those fuckers up, right?

And it’s obvious that Italy is going fascist again. Decimate them as well. Hey, two birds, one stone.

The willingness of posters to ignore the majority’s culpability here doesn’t surprise me, but it is sickening nonetheless. I am trying very hard that the next time humanity feels it needs to throw out an inferior race it doesn’t come for you next.

But, practically speaking, such vile racism makes me happier that minority raw numbers in the U.S. are on the uptick. If we can’t rely on white people being ethical (lol) then we’ll just have to rely on numbers.

We’ll do our best to treat you all better once you’re a minority. Promise.

ponygirl: you are right. I hadn’t explicitly said so because I thought that was, well, obvious.

Did your 3 months in Europe include Italy? That’s the only place I’ve seen this phenomenon
myself.

I’d like to imagine that existing legislation ought to be enough to deal with these
people, whatever ethnic group(s) they belong to. Of course, they’re quite good at what
they do: passing stolen items along to accomplices very fast, jumping onto trains
as the doors close, etc. And most of the street work is done by people too young to be
arrested or prosecuted. (If, as I’ve been told, all the police can do with those
under age is take them back to their parents, then that’s pretty crazy and maybe
that would take new legislation.)

around Termini railway station in Rome, and near tourist spots like the Colosseum,
I would often see groups of distinctively-dressed women and children who would hold up
newspapers (to anyone) or babies (mostly to female victims). The idea seems to be that
while you are looking at this newspaper or baby thinking “why is this person holding
up this item?” they other six or so take your stuff.

This happens in every country in the world, probably at every tourist site on the planet.

If you are stupid/naive enough to get hoodwinked by it, while I won’t say you “deserved” it, you certainly don’t get to act all self-righteous about the evilness of the ethnic group that perpetrated this popular scheme on you, and you definitely shouldn’t go around casting yourself as some kind of Great World Traveler Of Our Times who, despite your extreme savvitude, managed to get hoodwinked by this devious scheme. 

Because, seriously, it’s the oldest trick in the book.

OK, and can I please inject some sense into this conversation?

Anyone who thinks that a group of people whose main crime is petty and/or juvenile theft ought to be rounded up by the police, forced to register and carry special ID cards, and/or possibly expelled from their country of birth is A FUCKING FASCIST.

We are talking about pick-pocketing, for godsakes…  Maybe, just maybe, low-level nonviolent mugging.  Also possibly “aggressive panhandling”.  I’m not even sure that these crimes are felonies in the US.  Here in America, if you got caught lifting a wallet or snatching a purse, you’d do a few hours of community service, maybe pay a fine.  Possibly, if you had an extensive criminal record (a record involving other stuff, like drug charges, assault, other more serious kinds of robbery), you’d have the book thrown at you and do 30-90 days in a local jail.

The Opoponax (sorry about the misspelling earlier. I should use larger fonts. and read
more carefully.):

I hope you don’t think I’m casting myself as some kind of great world traveler. Some people
seemed to be saying this stuff didn’t happen. I just wanted to testify that it’s real. You seem to be saying it happens a lot. I wouldn’t know. I’ve only seen it in industrial quantities in Rome, and not
at all anywhere except Italy.

The ID card / registration stuff? Yeah, insane, fascist, very Northern League. Well, it
seems a bit much even for them. I would have been less surprised by the National Alliance
coming up with this.

At the same time, the current trend to begging and petty theft has more to do with lack of other opportunities available to or familiar and culturally acceptable to gypsies/Roma.

The Gypsy/Roma penchant for selling flowers on the street or selling goods at traveling bazaars has to do with a lack of other opportunities available. The annoying Turkish carpet-store salesmen who try to trick tourists on the street to get them into their store are a result of lack of opportunities. People who go up to tourists and try to convince them to give them money in exchange for acting as your “guide” do so because of a lack of opportunities. These people are just trying to make a living. People who try to pick your pocket or mug you do so because they’re thieves.

I have some sympathy for beggars among the homeless Roma, Albanians, and other destitute groups in Europe. However, lots of times, beggars are just being exploited as part of a crime ring where they are instructed to beg for money and then kick up their earnings to their handler, who beats them if they don’t come up with a decent take for the day.

You seem to be saying it happens a lot.

What I’m saying is that creating a diversion so that your buddy can pick a mark’s pockets is the oldest thievery trick in the book, gypsy or not.  That doesn’t make it right, but it makes people who insist that because someone of X ethnic group did this to them, therefore all others of that ethnic group should have their human rights violated look like major league assholes.  And, by association, it makes people who may not want them rounded up, but do persist in thinking “all gypsies are cold-blooded thieves and I hate them” look like minor league assholes. 

It also makes people who claim not to be one of “those kinds of travelers” (as both you and Temporis did) seem completely ridiculous.  Because if you really did manage to be robbed every time you went into or came out of a European train station, you are, by definition, one of “those kinds of travelers”.

See, this is how it works. You take away most opportunites for a group of people and then blame them for turning to crime. Or if they don’t and just are poor and dirty, you kick them out for being poor and dirty. It’s how racism works. And it’s been happening to the Roma since they arrived in Europe.

The Opononax:

I saw these people in the area around Termini railway station (and the Colosseum
and a few other place) most of the times I was there but I don’t _think_ they ever robbed me.
I don’t think this was because of my elite savviness skills, though. Luck? Looking poor?

I saw them rob plenty of other people. Sometimes with the newspaper/baby thing, sometimes
by just walking up to people and taking stuff openly. I’m not sure how savviness saves you in the latter case.

“robbed very time I went into or out of a European railway station”? I haven’t said anything of the kind.