Hundreds of Roma Expelled from France: Humane Deportation or Xenophobic Slum Clearing?

This Thursday, two planes landed in Bucharest, Romania. On the flight were the first of 700 Roma people to be expelled from France by the end of this month.  Several thousand Roma (an Eastern European ethnic group also known as Gypsies) have taken up residence in illegal squatter camps throughout France and other European countries. As EU citizens, they are allowed to freely move between member states. But according to French law, they must possess work or study visas to remain in the country longer than three months – a document few have managed to secure.

The French government vehemently defends their deportation campaign, saying it is “safe and humane” – claiming that sending in armed police at six in the morning, pulling mothers out of their homes and threatening to take their children is actually in the Roma’s best interest.  Who would want to live like a third-world squatter without running water, sewage, or electricity? But I wonder if the French government has stopped for a moment to think about where these Roma will go once their makeshift homes have been evacuated.

There’s a reason they’ve chosen to live in shanties and make a meager living picking up odd jobs and begging on the street. As much as this seems like the worst of times for us middle-class folk, this existence in France is probably better than life back home. For many Roma who have a tradition of nomadism,  home in Romania (where they are being sent) is even less like home.

While it’s tempting to separate this case from thousands of similar cases in the developing world, the forced eviction of the Roma from France bears striking resemblance to large-scale slum clearings of third-world cities. Forced evictions of informal settlements have long been used as a policy to control undesirable populations in the name of public safety and health. Though this case happens to be in a prosperous country, it is no different than similar forced evacuations of informal settlements and shantytowns in places like Kenya, Brazil and India.

And just like other slum-dwellers and homeless populations across the globe, the Roma have been stigmatized as vagrants and leeches on public resources – and their homes a breeding ground for insecurity, crime, and disease. This round of deportations comes after a series of unfortunate police encounters in southern France that has President Sarkozy labeling Roma camps as hotbeds for illegal trafficking, prostitution, begging, tax evasion, and other crimes.

Discrimination against this group is hardly a new or unique to France. Global Poverty blogger Yemisrach Kifle wrote two months ago of a similar forced eviction in Belgrade. But if France, Serbia and the rest of the European Union would take a look at the record, such evictions don’t really solve any problems. Sending squatters packing just creates more poverty and homelessness (and possibly more crime) than we started out with. At best, the evicted will return to Romania, where they will continue to face persecution and destitution – but it won’t be France’s problem anymore. Though some are being given 300 euros for going voluntarily, this will hardly be enough to start a home and live off when confronted with bleak economic opportunities back home. More likely, they will just return to France and set up their shanties somewhere else. “This situation has been going on for years, they always come back,” says Coralie Guillot, a project coordinator for Parada, a French NGO that works with Roma people.

If France really wants to treat the Roma with dignity and humanity, the country’s leaders should produce a strategy that will help them integrate into the rest of society instead of stigmatizing them further. By sending the Roma packing with little thought as to what they will do once they leave, this policy can be seen as little more than xenophobic conservatism led by France’s top leaders.

Photo Credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D.