Free Movement for Whom, Where, When? Roma EU Citizens in France and Spain

Abstract

EU citizenship is often regarded as the culmination of a process whereby the transnational mobility of “workers” has led to the granting of rights to “humans” qua citizens, with both legal scholars and ethnographers emphasizing its normative significance in this respect. Challenging such a narrative, this study sets out to highlight the contingent nature of a postnational EU citizenship, with reference to the lived experiences of migrant Roma. As a first step, we highlight the conditionality within EU law associated with the granting of rights to those enacting EU citizenship by residing within EU territory beyond their own member state. In a second step, we highlight the variable ways in which such conditionality is deployed in different national contexts, with reference to the frameworks in France and Spain. While the former has deployed these conditions in a manner that has excluded EU citizens, particularly migrant Roma, the latter—at least for a time—was more permissive in its granting of rights to EU citizens than EU law required. However, in a third step, we suggest that the lived experiences of migrant Roma in these two national contexts have not been as different as the legal differences suggest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on Romanian Roma in two municipalities near Barcelona, we demonstrate the ways in which a local politics of exclusion is legally possible, even within an ostensibly permissive juridical framework of citizenship. We highlight how the ambiguity of a multilevel citizenship not only opens up possibilities for multifaceted forms of exclusion, but also for various forms of resistance, both within and beyond a juridical citizenship framework.

Creating Undocumented EU Migrants through Welfare: A Conceptualization of Undeserving and Precarious Citizenship

“…This large-scale campaign – which entailed the physical removal of EU citizens from French soil and the forcible destruction of allegedly illegal camps – created a major outcry in different parts of Europe. It was also roundly condemned by then Commission Vice President Viviane Reding, who compared the actions of the French authorities with the treatment of minorities during the Second World War ( Parker and López Catalán, 2014 ). The experience of Roma EU migrants strongly differs from that of undocumented Italian migrants in Belgium, which we discuss in detail below.…”

“…On the other hand, studies on post-enlargement Central and Eastern European EU migrants have often focused on the impact of such migration on the receiving countries’ labour markets (see, for instance, Black et al, 2010 ) and the way in which welfare use by some EU citizens can become a contentious topic in receiving societies. Within this second trend, there is a wave of recent publications devoted to Roma migration and their deportation as EU citizens ( Fassin et al, 2014 ; Parker and López Catalán, 2014 ; Van Baar, 2013 ).…”

The Stilled-Other of the Citizen. “Roma Beggars” and Regimes of (Im)mobility in an Austrian City

“…In recent years, mobility studies have increasingly focused on different politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010;Squire 2010;Parker and López Catalán 2014;Schapendonk and Steel 2016;van Baar 2012) as well as on the mobility of politics (Peck and Theodore 2010). Hence, the questions have been placed on the agenda of how movement, power and politics are interwoven, what this means for everyday life and how movement is both experienced and conditional on experience (Baerenholdt 2013;Doughty and Murray 2014).…”

Roma migrant children in Catalonia: between the politics of benevolence and the normalization of violence

“…SIS, 5 a social service within the [office of the] mayor of Barcelona, one of the things that it suggests is that, understanding the situation, the families return to their country … what I think is that families that are here in a very poor situation … well, they think, if you live so badly here, why you don't go back to your country where you will do better? These benevolent practices of voluntary return understood as "public aid" challenge the European principle of freedom of movement (see Parker and López Catalán 2014) and reinforce the cultural prejudice of itinerancy or nomadism.…”