Roma asylum
July 24, 2009
Canada imposed the visa restrictions after more than 1,700 Czech Roma, or gypsies, applied for refugee status in the first six months of 2009 - twice as many as in the whole of last year.
Canada had only removed visa restrictions in late 2007. They were originally introduced 10 years earlier, after a previous influx of Roma asylum seekers.
Many of the Roma want to leave their home because of what they see as an increased level of anti-Roma activity in the country. Ales Horvath and his young family had been planning to try to join relatives who moved to Canada in the mid 1990s.
"Ninety percent of us have been attacked," he says, "including me, my brother, my cousins. Everyone's experienced physical attacks. On top of that, I can't go into just any restaurant or disco with my wife - many places won't let us in."
This, he feels, is no place to bring up his children. "It's 2009 and our children get called black bastards as soon as they start school - other kids are taught by their parents that gypsies are bad, that they're dirty, they steal, and so on."
Far-right increasingly targeting Roma
The last year has seen a significant rise in anti-Roma demonstrations and statements by far-right groups in the Czech Republic, while violent attacks are not unknown. Many link the increase in the number of Czech Roma applying for asylum in Canada to this development.
However, Roman Krystof, a former head of the Czech government's Roma Affairs Commission, who carried out research in Canada into Roma migration, says he believes that, while it is a factor, they would have gone to Canada in any case.
"We found out that there is some kind of system of invitation," says Krystof. "We called it a 'prospector system,' where these people are leaving to join their families … but to our knowledge in much more numerous cases they just used the asylum system to start a better life."
Economic migrants or victims of racism?
In a report, Krystof asserted that there was a good deal of organization behind the wave of applications for refugee status, with shady figures encouraging would-be asylum seekers and later arranging work for them in Canada's grey economy.
This is strongly refuted as anti-Roma "propaganda" by Ivan Vesely, head of the Roma rights group Dzeno. Vesely also says it's a mistake to differentiate between economic migrants and victims of prejudice.
"In the group of economic (refugees) are people who met with discrimination on the labor market," he says, pointing out that unemployment rates among Czech Roma are much higher than in the majority population. The Czech government itself has admitted that the gap between ordinary Czechs and the Roma minority in the country was growing.
Nevertheless, says Vesely, many of the Roma who have gone to Canada owned their own businesses and were relatively successful.
Ales Horvath, who runs a construction firm, says Canada's introduction of visas has merely delayed his plans to start a new life beyond the borders of the Czech Republic.
"It doesn't alter the fact I want to leave. I can't go to Canada, but I can go to England, to Ireland, to Belgium, to France. I have relatives in those countries and they're keeping an eye out for work for me - if something turns up, I'll pack up and go in two or three days," he says.
"We're Roma, we've always travelled about: it's no problem for us to settle in one place, then up sticks and settle somewhere else."
Author: Ian Willoughby, Prague
Editor: Michael Lawton