Unlikely Border Crossings
On March 31, 2023, Akwesasne Mohawk police announced in a press release that their officers had found a capsized boat and the lifeless bodies of its passengers: “The eight individuals were from two families of Romanian and Indian descent, with the two children having Canadian citizenship.”Footnote 1 For several days, all eyes were on the Indigenous territory bisected by the Canada–US border.Footnote 2
Soon, journalists noted that there was more to the Romanian family, stating that they were “members of the Roma minority,” who had arrived to seek asylum in 2018, and that the father had a “history of illegal crossings into the United States and a troubled immigration history.”Footnote 3 The lawyer in charge of their asylum application, Peter Ivanyi,Footnote 4 explained how the family’s desperation led them to cross an unfamiliar river on a motorboat by emphasizing the poverty, systemic violence and discrimination that push Romani groups out of their countries of origin in Eastern or Central Europe. The family had been denied refugee status in Canada and was in line for deportation. In May 2023, a memorial was held by the TAIBU Community Health Center and Toronto’s Roma Community Centre, lamenting the tragic loss of their lives.
The drama of this Romanian Romani family lent to my previous fieldwork in Toronto a sullen prescience. This recent case had certain similarities with past cases, that in 2012 had compelled the Canadian government to enact reforms to its Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, collectively known as the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act.Footnote 5 Jason Kenney, then Minister of Immigration, justified the adoption of more restrictive asylum legislation and the creation of a list of safe countries of origin with promises to keep away alleged “bogus refugees” that he said were taking advantage of Canada’s generosity and displacing “real” claimants who deserved to stay.Footnote 6 Coming from an allegedly “safe” place, Romani families traveling from the European Union were, and remain, at the center of these debates, as antigypsy stereotyping and anti-immigrant sentiments join in an occasional perfect storm of visibility that has been utilized to further local and national political interests.
This chapter focuses on Romani migration processes to the Americas from a Canadian perspective. In the 2010s, an upsurge of academic scholarship captured the moment when Romani visibility emerged entangled in CanadianFootnote 7 and East-Central EuropeanFootnote 8 politics. It is time to build upon this short-lived scholarly burst to understand cases like the Iordache family’s unfortunate passing. To do so, this chapter first emplaces this prior scholarship into a wider contemporary Atlantic context to bring awareness to the persistence of a Romani presence on the North American continent. I then rely on ethnographic fieldwork to paint a picture of the interconnected diasporic communities who continue to make Canada their home.
Determining the precise number of Romani people in Canada is difficult. In 2011, the most recent data from Canada’s National Household Survey placed the number of Romani individuals at 5,255.Footnote 9 Unofficial population estimates, however, range as high as 80,000 or even 100,000 people,Footnote 10 even though comprehensive census data is unavailable. This numeric variability makes it necessary to consider two additional factors: passing tactics that have allowed Romani groups in the Americas to go unnoticed, as well as the thousands of asylum claims filed each year over the past two decades.Footnote 11 In the 2010s the majority of European Romani families who made transatlantic crossings arrived in Canada’s main cities: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Arrivals from Czechia and Hungary were the most visible and numerous, especially from 1997 to 2009 for the Czechs and from 1999 to 2002 and 2009 to 2012 for the Hungarians.
In each instance, a combination of new visa restrictions and modifications to Canada’s asylum policies led to a sharp drop in acceptance rates and fewer transatlantic crossings, along with a significant decline in media attention and public visibility.Footnote 12 An overview of Romani histories of migration and border crossing in Canada can lay the base for a more grounded approach to a phenomenon that has otherwise been treated as fleeting. To do so, I highlight the historical continuities that have usually been set aside to emphasize periods of higher visibility. My argument relies on a critical understanding of migration as border crossing and mobilities as meaningful movements that are intrinsic to human experiences.Footnote 13 Mobilities are the embodied interplay of movement and stasis that discourses try to signify.Footnote 14 In my past work I coined the term Romani Atlantic, borrowing from Paul Gilroy’s elaborations on the Black Atlantic and the double consciousness of holding a position both inside and outside of discourses aiming at universality.Footnote 15 As Canadian cases brought in this chapter will show, the movements of Romani people have usually been seen through a binary lens that divides “nomad” from “sedentary,” “bogus” from “real” and “national” from “foreign.” Such reductions gloss through the complexities of both migratory journeys and mobile lives.
For this specific piece, the Romani Atlantic refers to the awareness and enactment of Romani diasporic connections, which are both made possible and constrained by nation state border-making efforts. Lives and trajectories have not only been shaped by Atlantic geopolitics, local realities and the connections established by families and individuals, but also by very real attempts to manage movements that are seen as out of control and dangerous. A Romani Atlantic lens complements other perspectives on Romani migration that have focused on policymaking, legal moments of high visibility and push vs. pull migration factors to and from localities defined by national borders.Footnote 16 Gilroy’s focus on the middle passage also informs the chosen methodology, which prioritizes connections, networks and frictions that both enable and constrain Romani lives.Footnote 17 The intention is to denaturalize nations as the starting point of migration,Footnote 18 inspired by the historical and anthropological works that have used concepts such as circulation and mobility to describe Romani transatlantic journeys.Footnote 19
This chapter grounds the Romani presence in Canada by decentering national borders while prioritizing individual and collective journeys chronologically.Footnote 20 It focuses on the role that mobilities have had in the lives of migrants to Canada and identifies “mobility capital,”Footnote 21 or the specific skills, resources and knowledge that have made individual and family journeys possible. Descriptions center acts of border crossing, which migration regimes structure and constrain.Footnote 22 In so doing, it contributes to the transatlantic and translocal perspectives in Romani studies to better explain Romani history in the context of the complex mobilities that have shaped Romani lives in the Americas.
The following section focuses on how Romani histories have been built through transatlantic crossings. Given the better documentation of the twentieth century, I will prioritize the continuities that can be identified in the available sources, and the effects that moments of visibility of Romani arrivals have had in Canada. The argument relies on the recognition of the continual presence of Romani people in North America, evidenced by the narratives of Romani protagonists themselves. It also notes key transformations that have occurred throughout specific historical periods, divided here into the turn of the twentieth century, the post–World War II era, the Cold War era and the current post-socialist times.
Turn of the Twentieth Century
The late Ronald Lee, a Romani Canadian author and intellectual, preferred to talk about the “North American Romani” population instead of limiting his analysis to specific countries like Canada, the US or Mexico. He claimed that British Romani families, like the Stanleys, the Stokes, the Lee-Adams or the Wilsons, who had come during colonial times, had either assimilated into the Gazhe (non-Romani) or intermarried with the Kalderash Roma from the Balkans and Eastern Europe.Footnote 23 Members of different Kalderash vitsi (kinship-based groups), such as the Lovária, Churária, Bashaldé, and Rusurja,Footnote 24 had crossed the ocean following the late nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia, forming extensive kinship networks throughout the Americas.Footnote 25 Sinti and Romungere Roma families also arrived during these decades, from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, respectively.Footnote 26 Such evidence points to the multiplicity of migration trajectories within the Romani diaspora.
During this period, the Canadian government opened its doors to European settlers, some of whom were Romani, attracting not only migrants new to the Americas, but also families who had previously migrated to the United States and Argentina.Footnote 27 The Immigration Act of 1869 initiated open immigration, connecting “immigration and colonization of unsettled lands.” It pushed for the documentation of immigrant arrivals and assessed their potential for developing “uncultivated lands.” Yet it also blocked the landing of disabled and “pauper immigrants” and allowed migration officials to exercise discretion over who they judged to be a desirable migrant.Footnote 28
The first archival evidence of Romani people in Canada comes from an 1862 Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, prison log documenting naturalized Romani citizens who had been jailed for loitering.Footnote 29 Media impressions of Romani groups in Canada also depicted their arrival at Montreal’s Canadian Pacific Railway station in 1899 and at Toronto’s Yonge Street in 1900. They had arrived from the United States, Mexico and even Brazil.Footnote 30 The mobilities of these families were not frictionless and speak to the importance of border crossings and labeling. This includes encounters with US inspectors in Montreal, who were excluding Romani arrivals in 1904 because of their appearance, as well as Romani interactions with border guards at main ports of entry. During the latter, families were asked for their occupations and itineraries, which resulted in their categorization as “Gypsies.” One immigration official noted: “From the manner of dress, appearance and evidence submitted, I am fully convinced that these aliens are in reality what are termed ‘Gypsies.’”Footnote 31
Such accounts point to traveling lifestyles (making use of tents, horse carts and later motor cars) that enabled economic activities, such as fortune-telling, smithing and horse breeding, among other trades. Sources focus on encounters visible to the general public and foreground the complicated relationships these Romani people had with authorities. The mobility tactics of these families labeled as “Gypsies” by authorities included carrying large amounts of money, relying on mobile trades, connecting preemptively to lawyers and officials and knowing how to operate in bureaucratic spaces.
Oral histories record Romani families living in Canada since the early twentieth century. Michael Butch, current president of Toronto’s Roma Community Centre and leader of the music group The Gypsy Rebels, explained:
My family, my ancestors, came here in 1908, to Canada … They arrived in … the state of New York … Not all my family went to Canada. That’s why I got relatives in the United States of America. The ones that did go to Canada, stayed there since 1908. … So, what they did was they turned around and found out that Canada was giving free land up west, to experienced farmers with animals.Footnote 32
Here, Butch probably referred to the Dominion Lands Act,Footnote 33 in effect from 1872 to 1930, which reduced Indigenous lands and gave financial incentives for “desirable” settlers to purchase up to 260 acres if they lived on and farmed their plot. He also hints at the relaxed border controls between the US and Canada at the time. Importantly, Canadian state policy impacted these early migratory movements.
Butch also provided information about his family’s cross-border mobile practices between Canada and the United States:
They sold their land in [19]50, 55 … coming up here with a brand-new car. Thinking that [it] is better here up East. … But they didn’t come to Toronto first … they went to Montreal. In 1962 I was born, and my family came here to Toronto … They stayed in the city for a little while, then came to Hamilton, and then came back to Toronto. [In the meantime] we went to the States for a while, cause my grandmother was back in the States in Pennsylvania … I remember I was like six years old; I even went to school in Tremont, Pennsylvania. My grandmother lived in Wilkes-Barre. We stayed there cause my mother had cancer. And we stayed there for a couple of years, I even went to Pittsburgh, and we stayed there, and so, my grandmother got back here. We brought her back here in [19]70.
In North America, cases such as the Butch family’s also show how regional configurations shaped mobilities throughout this period. Romani immigrants who owned farmland dealt with a sharp urban versus rural divide that compelled them to head to the cities to trade. They also made choices based on distinctive national circumstances in order to stay connected to their relatives and secure better living arrangements. Families’ reasons to seek better places related to personal circumstances and health. They were also motivated by their perception of a site as beneficial to raise a family and do business, even if it meant moving across borders to a new city, state, province or even country. Some families might have attempted to replicate mobile economic strategies they had used in EuropeFootnote 34 – Butch’s family, for instance, first landed in New York, then moved to Alberta where they acquired and then sold their land, only to move to Montreal and then Toronto (with numerous stops between). The new social and economic contexts both enabled and constrained their possibilities.Footnote 35
World War II and the Hungarian Revolution
The mobilities of Romani groups in Central and Eastern Europe have been intertwined with governmental attitudes and policies.Footnote 36 These have included “betterment” processes that aimed to reduce, evangelize and re-educate so-called minorities within Europe.Footnote 37 By the end of the nineteenth century, racial ideologiesFootnote 38 supported the transformation of “betterment” programs into security-driven policies. In Central Europe this shift led to the creation of entire investigative branches, such as the German Nachrichtendienst in Bezug auf die Zigeuner (Gypsy Information Agency), as well as international police agreements between numerous countries.Footnote 39 By the 1930s “Zigeuner” were subject to policies of expulsion and settlement which combined with more “traditional” policies of segregation, eviction and even internment.Footnote 40 The persecution reached its zenith in 1938, when Himmler called for a “resolution of the Gypsy question,” initiating deportations to ghettos and, later, concentration camps.Footnote 41
Forced displacements reverberated throughout Europe and the Atlantic. Lajos,Footnote 42 one of the oldest members of the Board of Directors of the Roma Community Centre in Toronto, and a Lovara Roma from Hungary, recalled the period of the government of Regent Miklós Horthy (1920–44), even before Nazi occupation, as characterized by persecution and starvation. He also associated Horthy’s successor, Ferenc Szálasi (1944–45), with ghettoes, death camps and the extermination of Jews and Romani peoples:Footnote 43
During the wartime I had a hard time. … I was a child then. … My mother died in the first bombing anyway … by the Allied forces. … So, we have no choice, father don’t want to leave us alone and be grown up as you say, orphans. Therefore, we had to run, we went to Slovakia. [Then] to the Balkans, and we went to Yugoslavia. … Then the situation was bad, we went to Romania. [In Romania came] the liberation by the Russian army, [and we] moved back to Hungary.
Such family movements were necessary to survive troubled times and stay together. Across the Atlantic, Canada itself was known for being unwelcoming to displaced racialized populations escaping the war. Decades of immigration policies that barred specific undesirable groups from entry,Footnote 44 under the guise of choosing immigrants perceived as useful,Footnote 45 resulted in instances in which Jewish and other refugees were turned back.Footnote 46
Most Romani survivors came to Canada later, once migratory policies responded to Cold War politics and the 1951 Geneva Convention. One of these policies, the 1952 Immigration Act,Footnote 47 barred disabled individuals, although it did not mention ethnicity or race. It did however, grant immigration officials discretionary power to block or deport those they considered undesirable.Footnote 48 Meanwhile, in Europe, with the foundation of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), people labeled as “Gypsies” were briefly seen as deserving of institutional support for having been victims of racial discrimination under Nazism.Footnote 49 When the IRO’s mandate ended in 1952, national authorities assumed its responsibilities, developing migration policies based on the perception of “Gypsies” as a “social menace.”Footnote 50
A European postwar environment where most productive systems had been dismantled forced countries such as Hungary to incorporate Romani individuals into the labor market. Lajos continued: “So I don’t have a choice. The Romas did good because, at that time, they sent them to work, and they earned money.” However, the impending turn toward authoritarianism prompted him to leave: “Until the revolution [1956] … We are going back to the same system that had been before, probably it’s going to get much worse. We had experience.” The Lovara elder escaped the subsequent invasion of the country by Soviet troops and left for Red Cross refugee camps first in Augsburg and later Eindhoven. He then traveled to the port of Rotterdam, where, after working for the Holland American Line as a waiter, he finally decided to relocate to the Americas.
In 1958 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tallied the total number of displaced people who left Hungary at 200,000;Footnote 51 about 37,500 of these arrived in Canada after a transatlantic voyage by boat.Footnote 52 Lajos had managed to navigate the new postwar geopolitical landscape and be declared a displaced Hungarian refugee: “[After that] we landed in the Ville de Québec, Quebec City. So, after they call[ed] us by name one by one … and they give us anyway the landed immigrant papers. … That was a different story because we were political refugees. When you [as a] refugee were coming up here there was different.” These refugees from the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution who arrived in 1956 and 1957 were some of the first people given expedited passage into Canada; they were only preceded by Palestinian refugees in 1955.Footnote 53 Some of their descendants would later become well-known Romani activists. Gina Csanyi-Robah, educator and founder of The Romani Alliance, an organization in British Columbia, descends from these refugee families. Her musician grandfather and her mother lived in the enclaves created by Hungarian Romani refugee families.
Many of these new arrivals correspond to Lee’s classification of “sedentary Hungarian Romungere, mainly of the Bashaldé or musician groups who arrived as refugees, lost among the mass of non-Romani Hungarian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of 1956.”Footnote 54 However, even Lajos’ story does not correspond neatly to this characterization, since he was a Lovara, a member of a more mobile vitsa that had a history of travel around Europe. As more life stories become the subject of inquiry and documentation, the distinctiveness of each case shows how the mobilities of individuals, families and groups often defy generalizations.
The Cold War
During the Cold War, the political division of Europe between the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence brought a certain lull, but never a full stop, to transatlantic migration. The legal protection defining a refugee was not enshrined in Canadian law until 1976, the year a new immigration act was ratified.Footnote 55 This legislation sharply shifted Canadian policy to fulfill its international obligations to protect displaced persons and asylum seekers and to encourage family reunification. It would, however, double down on exclusion based on health and disability.
During this period, Romani groups did not experience the Western and Soviet blocs as hermetically sealed from one another. Connections from before the Iron Curtain fell extended to include new asylum seeking and allowed mobilities from the East to the West.Footnote 56 Nazik Deniz’s migration from Bulgaria, when she was ten years old, is one example. Deniz would later also become the director of the Roma Community Centre and an educator. She clarified a reason fewer people may have risked the journey during the Cold War: “In many ways, it was somewhat better for the Roma [back in Bulgaria under Communism], because at least at that point you were counted as a human being.” Conditions under communist regimes were arguably better for certain Romani groups that did not rely on mobile trades, as they had access to employment and education. However, they would need to adapt to the “stereotype role of the citizen of the Socialist order,” downplay their ethnic belonging and emphasize a working-class background.Footnote 57 Ronald Lee would also refer to this:
Now, under communism, the Roma who were coming here were mainly Vlach, because communism was against the Roma free enterprise. They tried to destroy the economic base of the Roma. So, this forced a lot of the Roma who are following this traditional lifestyle, this nomadic, coppersmithing, horse-trading, carpet-selling, whatever, to get out of the communist countries, go into Western Europe, North America, or Latin America. The settled Roma, the sedentary Roma, they saw it was better for them under communism, in some ways. They were provided with employment … They were given healthcare, their children were being educated, in the same schools as the other children, there was laws against discrimination, actual persecution.Footnote 58
The groups that were already used to moving across borders in Europe, which he calls “traditional,” continued to do so, adapting to the new context. Although it only became popular in the 1990s, the term “Gypsy refugees” was first adopted precisely to signal this passage as Romani people searched for ways to move between socialist countries (such as Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia) and countries in the West (such as Sweden or West Germany).Footnote 59
Under protections enshrined in the 1976 Immigration Act, claims to refugee status also became a rare but possible path to Canada, especially for those from countries under communist governments. For example, some Lovara refugees who landed in Canada in 1973 told Ronald Lee that they had left Russia for Yugoslavia, escaping forced settlement. They then traveled to Italy as refugees and then lived in West Germany, the Netherlands and France, before crossing the Atlantic. Group elders recruited Lee, Lajos and other Romani intellectuals with experience with the legal system to provide counsel and support after a failed attempt to cross into the US. When turned away at the border across from Plattsburgh, New York, they had to camp in Brossard near Montreal. These families then became the center of migratory politics involving Roma in Canada.Footnote 60 The Brossard encampment became a proxy of conflicting political forces, as the central government in Canada and the Parti Québécois (PQ) clashed over immigration issues. The PQ advocated for Quebec’s autonomy to allow them to stay, while the federal government pushed for their expulsion.
Canada’s own internal social and political conflicts and processes continued to affect the trajectories of those who had already made the country their home.Footnote 61 As noted above, Michael Butch’s family moved to Toronto during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, a process unfolding throughout the 1960s that introduced significant liberal, secular and nationalist reforms to the province. This period laid the groundwork for future independence referendums in 1980 and 1995, which aimed at the emancipation of French speakers and a push for social democratic reforms. Others moved to Toronto after Quebec’s threat of independence in the 1980s, including Lajos:
I lived [for] 25 years in Montreal. … Everything was fine and then the situation [became] tight because a constant [threat of] separation in Montreal. I said, look, I came over here to Canada and I want to be Canadian, I don’t want to be separated. … I decided in 1976 when they had the Olympics, when it’s over, I would move back to Ontario.
Even members of groups not known for their mobility crossed the Iron Curtain to the Americas at this time. Deniz elaborated on how her family managed to travel from Bulgaria:
We were not even supposed to come to Canada, we were on route going over to Cuba for vacation because at that time, from that country, being also our fellow socialist, you could only go to Cuba on vacation. We’d never seen anywhere else before; we’d never even crossed over to Romania. So, we were going on vacation, the plane stopped in Montreal, and this is how it all [started].
In other instances, elite musicians, such as Lache Cercel, were able to leave Ceaușescu’s Romania by leveraging their musical renown. Cercel, a violinist and interpreter of folk music, defected with his family during an invitation to play in Canada.Footnote 62 In the 1990s the fall of the Berlin Wall would open new possibilities for those looking to make the transatlantic leap.
The European Union
Academic literature on Romani migration to Canada has mostly focused on the two decades that followed the fall of communism. Reasons for this include the increasing number of Romani migrants to Canada and their widespread visibility. Ronald Lee referred to this phenomenon as “Roma refugees from democracy,” hinting at the inherent contradiction of refugees coming from Central and Eastern European countries as they shifted toward democratic institutions.Footnote 63 The cases of Czech and Hungarian asylum seekers are the most representative.
After visa restrictions for Czech citizens were lifted in 1996, the television documentary Na vlastní oči (With Your Own Eyes) aired on Czech TV Nova in August 1997. It portrayed Canada as a “Gypsy paradise,” where families would no longer encounter the exclusions they experienced in daily life. Although the image transmitted was later labeled a “distorted reality” by Canadian authorities,Footnote 64 a desire to leave matched the material possibility of travel for some families. What followed has been described as the first “wave” of Romani families arriving from Czechia (and later Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia),Footnote 65 with the documentary as one of its main triggers.Footnote 66 This also made their identity as “Roma refugees” visible. However, as scholars have noted, Romani exclusion and the rise of extreme nationalism and racist violence were crucial backdrops to such movements out of Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote 67 This avenue lasted until Canada reimposed the visa requirement on Czech nationals in 1997, blaming an increase in applicant numbers.Footnote 68 After Czechia became part of the EU in 2004, visa restrictions were lifted again in 2007 as part of reciprocity agreements between the EU and Canada. This second moment lasted until 2009, when travel privileges were withdrawn once again. Asylum seekers who were considered “economic migrants” were cited as the reason for such restrictions.Footnote 69
Hungarian arrivals followed this pattern after visa requirements were lifted.Footnote 70 The highest number of claimants was registered in 1999 and again in 2009, with drops after the above measures were enacted. For a while, Hungary was listed as the number one source of asylum seekers for the Canadian system. In the Czech and Hungarian cases, transatlantic migration was a constant, even in the years when targeted policies were enacted.Footnote 71
The father of the Szalai family, whom I interviewed in 2013,Footnote 72 talked about his family’s early life in Hungary: “the strange thing is that we had to move all the time, you know? At first just in Szekszárd … and then around small villages, and then to Budapest. We were always trying to find a better place to live … because most of the times we had these racist neighbors who just can’t stand Roma.” Describing this family as “sedentary Roma,” or focusing only on their transatlantic crossing, underplays the displacements that threw this family into a marginalized situation in the first place. In Hungary, the rise of right-wing extremism and nationalism led to a more hostile environment. For Szalai and others violent attacks escalated to a breaking point:
So, I was working at the Roma self-government for three years, and I had to stop working there because of serious attacks, physical attacks. It happened three times. And you know, the third time [was] when they beat [me] up … my family was near, they saw everything. So, I just had to tell that you know, that it’s enough, I just cannot do it. … So, because my brother already was in Belgium, I went to Belgium. … We left Hungary in 2009.
Despite such experiences, Canadian officials tended to understand these arrivals as motivated by economic forces.Footnote 73 They failed to consider other factors that guided decisions to migrate. Arriving in Canada at a moment of visibility also subjected Romani migrants to a particular treatment: “Some officers were standing there and one of them asked me what the reason is, why I came. So, I told him we are seeking refugee [status]. And you know what? The first thing he said was something like: damn it, one more refugee family.”
Once in Canada, they were again subject to a precarious and uncertain bureaucratic asylum process. The long wait included hours filing their claim, standing by in the airport, scrambling to fill out personal information and laboring to quickly find a lawyer.Footnote 74 In the end, they could only hope that the paperwork they procured would work as evidence for their case. For this family, this meant two years of doubt (from 2010 to 2012) while their hearing took place.
It’s just, you know, just the uncertainty. Not knowing that, which will be the final day you need to leave anyone. Any day can be the final day when you need to leave and it´s just something, you know, [a] psychological thing.
During this short window, only a few selected families and individuals were granted asylum. It was given based on the merit of their specific cases and by weighing their experiences of discrimination, violence and persecution. Toronto’s Roma Community Centre, located in the city that received the most claims, played a vital role in some of these legal processes. The Szalai family appealed the original negative decision in their case, lost again and then applied with a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment which was accepted several months later. Most applicants were not that lucky and were deported or chose to abandon their claims, given the odds stacked against them.
Asylum Policy Change and Deportation
By 2013, the situation for Romani asylum seekers had already started to change; the Canadian Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration attempted to curb new arrivals.Footnote 75 Jason Kenney, then minister, labeled Roma refugees as “queue jumpers” and “bogus refugee claimants,” to justify swift and drastic changes to asylum policies, which resulted in an amendment to the current law referred to as Bill C-31.Footnote 76 Kenney himself traveled to Hungary to assess the situation and used the Hungarian national media to deter newcomers. During the peak in Hungarian migration, the city of Miskolc (where many of the asylum seekers came from) woke up to a billboard, written in Hungarian, which warned of risking a trip to Canada. By reproducing the Hungarian government’s narrative of inclusive democracy, Canadian authorities sought to discredit allegations of racial persecution in Hungary.Footnote 77
Human rights activists in Canada responded by issuing reports, calling for rallies and creating documentaries countering anti-immigration strategies. Activists and scholars noted that Bill C-31 reflected a larger pattern of exclusion from the asylum path.Footnote 78 The legislative changes included a list of Designated Countries of Origin (DCO) deemed safe and therefore less likely to generate refugees. Criticism of these measures did not undo the asylum system changes; Romani families increasingly found it difficult to find refuge in Canada.Footnote 79
Policy and media portrayals reduced Romani lives and experiences of migration to stereotypical tropes that appeared whenever observers conjured “Gypsies.” Binary ideas, such as “good” versus “fake” refugees, became enshrined in policy and legal categories, creating “deportable migrants.”Footnote 80 After several generations in Canada, Michael Butch and other Kalderash were conscious that local governments in Canada had a history of profiling Romani families. Witnessing the cases of asylum seekers who were caught shoplifting, Michael and others knew that these actions would “raise the heat” and “put us on that stereotype kind of world,” especially with the authorities. Police in North America regularly profiled Romani families, as a series of highly criticized seminars detailing “Gypsy crime” exemplified in 2016.Footnote 81 The term “bogus,” so widespread during the Canadian government’s reaction to Romani arrivals, related to these assumptions of criminality that became evident at the time. One television program noted: “A shiftless group of hoboes that doesn’t believe in property rights for themselves, they are nomads, or for others, they rob people blind! Now this scourge has come to Canada through fake refugee claims, over 5000 of them in the past five years are from Hungary.”Footnote 82
Such representations circulated around the Atlantic together with the people themselves. Families had run-ins with border patrols even before getting to Canadian territory, including at airports in both the UK and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Czech and Hungarian media reproduced public discourse that blamed Romani people for Canada’s visa imposition on Czech or Hungarian nationals.Footnote 83 Behind hundreds of rejected asylum claims were both structural discrimination and widespread lawyer malpractice.Footnote 84 An important number of journalistic pieces would publicize research findings, which spoke of stacked racial and class biases against Romani asylum seekers during their engagement with the legal process.Footnote 85 Despite this, only a small number of claimants were able to benefit from asylum; the Pusuma family, for example, who lived months under the protection of a church through sanctuary before being deported in 2014, was able to return with permits based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds in 2016.Footnote 86 Yet the following year, headlines promulgated more anti-Romani stereotypes just prior to Bulgarian and Romanian visa requirements being removed.Footnote 87 The so-called spike of asylum seeking that followed, however, was minuscule compared to former ones, attesting to the effectiveness of the measures generated by the disproportionate fear of an “invasion.”Footnote 88
Families that attempted to claim asylum at such times of heightened visibility were rarely as lucky as the Pusumas. Although some abandoned their cases after concluding they had no hope of approval, others waited hoping for a positive ruling, only to be deported. One of these deportees explains how returning to Hungary was a double risk, as even arriving at the Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport meant being profiled:
I had to go with the police car. Everyone was watching me. This is when I felt a bit awkward and embarrassed … then the police man was asking rudely: What were you doing, trying to be a refugee? Yes, I left. [I said] So you were leaving the country for your sentence? What kind of punishment? Maybe you are wanted, and they are trying to arrest you? But then I told them I felt very good in Canada and very sad to come back to Hungary, because there people are treating me humanely, nicely, not like you.
Despite such a contrast, stereotyping persisted even in Canada, such as when Toronto dealt with a short-lived “panhandler scare” in 2018.Footnote 89 These brief moments of visibility were usually a harsh lesson for families that were able to stay in Canada. Quickly, they learned that their means of sustenance and daily behavior needed to not feed the “stereotype kind of world,” in M. Butch’s words, that can be so counterproductive. Understanding the logic of a system that undermined asylum claims illuminates the conditions and sentiments that compelled the Iordache family to cross the Saint Lawrence River by boat, the story with which this chapter began.
Atlantic Connections
By centering continuities in transatlantic migration, this chapter provides a more comprehensive way to understand the Romani diaspora beyond descriptions limited by national borders or centered on population waves. The Romani Atlantic can be both context and method; following the very set of connections and relationships that make possible the diasporic reality of Romani lives provides a grounded approach to histories of their presence in Europe and the Americas. Such an approach, in this case from a Canadian perspective, puts forward the continuities of Romani presence in the Americas and highlights Romani mobilities, border crossings and mediated representations.
Focusing on moments of high visibility limits the potential to describe and understand Romani diasporic formations. This includes studies of high-profile Romani arrivals to the continent, such as asylum seekers to Canada between 1997 and 2012. Such moments must therefore be seen as part of the wider historical context, which points to Canadian policy as a driver of moments of intensive visibility and during which the labels that were used (including “refugee,” “Roma” and “Gypsy”) had the potential to either open doors or close them.
A century-long perspective allows for a deeper analysis of how moments of heightened visibility impact the broader continuities of Romani presence in Canada. Such circumstances are better seen as outcomes of policy decisions and geopolitical developments than as the result of actions by those directly affected. From a Romani Atlantic perspective, arrivals and deportations are still part of the Romani experience in Canada, including experiences that engage with transatlantic networks of mobility and exchange. As Audra Simpson notes about the Mohawk who live at the bank of the St. Lawrence River, such networked mobilities enact the knowledge of being connected as kin.Footnote 90 It was this connectedness, combined with rising anti-asylum sentiment and policies, that led to the Iordache family’s tragic passing in the same river, while trying to reach relatives in the US.
Although many families arriving to the Americas fulfilled lifelong dreams, this often came with a cost. This cost might have been resources, time, family or even their lives. For most recently arrived Romani Canadians, lifestyle migration, defined as looking for a “better life,”Footnote 91 is often motivated by feeling the need to take refuge. In this context, “a better life” cannot be expressed by separating work opportunities from safety and survival. These dimensions are intertwined in individual and collective decision-making, which are in turn intimately linked to the feelings that guide families into taking calculated risks and moving to unfamiliar lands.
In 2024, I caught up with the Szalai family in Toronto. Crossing the Atlantic had meant that beyond occasional video calls, they lived disconnected from their kin, who had remained in Europe or had returned to Hungary from Canada. The COVID-19 pandemic further fractured the few connections they had with activist initiatives in Toronto, which had already waned after the 2012 asylum policy change. Although they had managed to navigate the complex system of Canadian asylum policies and achieve Canadian citizenship, their ties with family and friends have been strained ever since. Border crossing from Europe to the Americas can be a risky and trying gamble. Even in seemingly successful cases, the consequences of mobility remain challenging.
Dedication
In memory of the Iordache family and other Romani migrants who lost their lives to their dreams of better places, together.
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