Fear of the Roma Turned Eastern Europe Against Refugees

One of the reasons Chancellor Angela Merkel has failed to persuade Germany's European Union partners to open their doors to refugees was eastern Europe's intransigence. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were at the forefront of the resistance to a collective resettlement effort. This recalcitrance has much to do with the failure of those countries to integrate their biggest ethnic minority, the Roma.

The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights has released a report on the Roma's situation, based on thousands of face-to-face interviews in the nine countries with sizable Roma populations. All of these are eastern and southern European states, six of them post-Communist. Most of Europe's 6 million Roma people live in those countries. The survey found that 80 percent of them live below these states' already-low poverty thresholds, a third have no running water and one in 10 have no electricity. The employment rates for men and women are 34 percent and 16 percent, respectively, and two-thirds of Roma people between the ages of 16 and 24 neither work nor attend school. Roma kids tend to drop out early, and even if they don't, they are likely to be held back in lower grades more often than their non-Roma peers.