TORONTO – Canada’s Roma community has been tossed into the spotlight in the past year, but it’s not for reasons they may want.
From “Chris Selley: How Europe’s Roma problems became ours,” to “Efforts to keep bogus Roma refugees out have failed: Jason Kenney,” you only need to read the latest headlines to get the picture.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney recently met with Hungarian leaders to discuss the issue of “irregular immigration” by Hungarian Roma to Canada, something that Kenney says is a signal that bogus refugee claims are being made. See headline above.
According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Hungary’s asylum claims to Canada have surpassed any other country in the past three years, with “approximately 40 per cent of claimants” coming from an economically depressed region in Hungary where the majority of people are Roma.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2012/2012-10-09.asp
Canada’s largest human smuggling ring was discovered in Hamilton, Ont., and a Hungarian Roma man and his family who came to Canada in 2008 claiming refugee status were eventually sentenced for the crime.
Advocates in Toronto for the Roma community say the group is being unfairly portrayed and are facing the same discriminatory practices that they were fleeing in the first place.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/feature-stories/europes-roma-community-still-facing-massive-discrimination-20090408
http://www.romatoronto.org/facts_journalists.html
With this in mind, Global News looks briefly at the story of the Roma people.
Key historical highlights
Although this term is no longer used because it’s not deemed politically correct, the name ‘gypsy’ is probably the most widely recognized term used for this group of people. Now called Roma, these ethnic groups of people are nomadic. They’re sometimes also called Travellers.
According to historians, Roma originate from India. Around 1000 A.D., began to travel west to Europe. Roma speak a language called Romani, although their dialects have commonalities with modern Hindi and Sanskrit, a historical Indian language.
Other dialects spoken by Roma today mix elements of Persian, Armenian, Greek, Romanian and Slavic languages.
Being a nomadic group, some settled in the Balkan regions of Europe and others moved closer to northern European areas, such as Britain and Scotland. The most numerous and culturally dominant groups today are the ones from the Balkan regions like Romania, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria.
They’re called the Vlacht-Roma.
According to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Roma are the largest ethnic minority living in Europe today. The agency says that there are about 10-12 million Roma living in Europe, with six million of them living in the European Union alone. http://fra.europa.eu/en/theme/roma
The Hungarian Roma make up the most “politically integrated and educated Roma population in Eastern Europe,” demonstrated by the fact that Roma have “self-governing structures” in place.
This is according to a discovery by Canadian immigration officials as part of a Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) report. The same report says that the highest areas of unemployment exist in the north and northeast of Hungary. Most claimants come to Canada from these areas.
Roma in Canada
According to the Roma Community Centre in Toronto there are about 80,000 people of Roma origin in this country today, however some others report numbers closer to half that. Most of the Hungarian Roma live in the Greater Toronto Area.
Interesting fact: Heritage Toronto says the Toronto Daily Star reported the first ‘gypsy camp’ – and its imminent eviction – near what is now the Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue area in Toronto, in 1910. There were four men, three women, three children, two bears, a baboon, as well as some horses and hens, reported to be camping out there.
The immigration issue
Hungary is a democratic country and a European Union Member State. Countries in the EU have solid human rights records.
In an email to Global News, a spokesperson from Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) explained that they’re concerned about the “number of people living in European Union member states filing for asylum in Canada. Typically, “the vast majority of all asylum claims from the EU are abandoned, withdrawn or rejected.”
“It is difficult to comprehend that EU countries – which are such strong advocates for human rights – should represent a top source region for asylum claims made in Canada,” said a spokesperson for the CIC.
This is where Hungarian Roma refugee claimants raise red flags.
Since lifting the visa requirement for Hungarian nationals in 2008, Canada has seen a large number of refugee applications from the country, according to a CBSA report released last year.
In 2011, Hungarian nationals made up 18 per cent of all claimants to Canada. And yet, from 2009 to 2011, 95 per cent of Hungarian refugee claimants were “abandoned, withdrawn, or rejected” by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), according to the CIC.
Kenney has said in prior interviews that he feels that Canada’s efforts to keep bogus refugee claimants out of the country have failed. This is where the Balanced Refugee Act comes into play.
Passed in 2010, the Balanced Refugee Act allows the government to create a safe list of countries, called the designated countries of origin (DCOs) list, which will essentially help weed out bogus refugee claimants. Any claims coming from the “safe list” will be flagged because countries on this list enforce human rights code that have to adhere to international laws, so the residents should not be facing persecution. This also means that they shouldn’t be filing for refugee status when entering the country.
According to CIC, “the aim of the DCO policy is to deter abuse of the refugee system by people who come from countries generally considered safe.” Legitimate refugee claimants will get protection faster, while bogus claimants will be sent home quickly.
One of the ways the government is going to decide which country makes the list is by reviewing data such as the frequency of claims that are withdrawn, rejected or abandoned- something that Hungary has already been flagged for doing.
Based on what Kenney has said about Hungarian Roma claimants, there is strong indication that the list may also include Hungary, assuming that as a democratic country, it should not produce refugees. Therefore in the future, Hungarian refugee claims would set off a red flag.
Kenney is set to announce the list this fall.
Criminal claims in Canada
According to the CBSA report, Ontario Service reported 311 Hungarian-born people who were jailed between December 2010 to January 2011.
Two hundred and twenty-six of those people were foreign nationals – meaning that they weren’t Canadian citizens or permanent residents – while 187 of these people had claimed refugee status.
The crimes included skimming fraud (meaning that credit card and debit card numbers would be illegally swiped at ATM and Point of Sale machines for fraud purposes), stealing cheques form small businesses, using false identification to re-apply for rejected refugee applications, human trafficking, collecting Ontario social services benefits after an individual was deported, mailbox tipping so that personal mail and cheques can be stolen and gang involvement.
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