Cynics Unlimited

My mother said I never should,
Play with the Gypsies in the wood.

It might come as a surprise to many Canadians that the largest source of refugee claims to Canada right now is not some war-torn land like Afghanistan or Iraq, but Hungary. At least since the fall of Communism, Hungary has been a more or less peaceful country, having transitioned fairly smoothly into a quasi-Western existence. Goulash, not gunfire, is what first springs to most people’s minds when they think of Hungary.

However, the news might not be quite as surprising if one considers that in 2009, Canada imposed a visa requirement on citizens of the nearby Czech Republic. The purpose of the visa was to stem the tide of refugees from the latter nation. However, the measure was not targeted at Czechs à la Vaclav Havel: the personae non gratae here were the so-called Roma, otherwise known as Gypsies.

The Gypsies have a long and complicated history. Once believed to have come from Egypt, hence the name ‘Gypsy,’ it is now clear that their homeland was in Northern India. Their original language, Romany, is related to Indian languages like Hindi, Punjabi and Gujarati, the names of which may be familiar to Canadians thanks to recent immigration. The Roma, or Gypsies, reportedly made their way from India to Europe around the 14^th century via the Balkans and from there spread to the rest of the continent. Virtually every European country has a Gypsy community. In Spain, the Gypsies helped create the colourful flamenco dancing. Britain as well had a distinct Roma population, a member of which is actor Bob Hoskins of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Mermaids fame; one of his grandmothers was a British Romani. Gypsies from Europe also travelled with their European overlords to the New World, as actor/director Robert Duvall’s documentary Angelo My Love about the Roma in New York demonstrates. Nonetheless, most Gypsies today live in Eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. There they form a small percentage of the population, a proportion expected to rise due to higher birth rates among the Roma than in the wider community.

Over the centuries, the Gypsies have been reviled, romanticized in works of fiction from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen to British author Jilly Cooper’s trash novel Riders, and routed to Nazi concentration camps during the Third Reich. Although the Roma have always been ‘outsiders,’ attitudes towards them even by nationalistic leaders of their host countries have varied through time and place. Adolf Hitler, most notably, despised the Roma as ‘non-Aryans.’ In contrast, Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan deliberately courted the Gypsies, describing them as ‘fellow victims of fascism’ (while Arkan’s overtures to the Roma were probably motivated more by opportunism than humanitarianism, the reality is that in World War II, both Serbs and Gypsies were persecuted by Axis forces).

Attitudes towards the Gypsies in the Anglo-Saxon world have likewise been ambiguous. On one hand, they have seen themselves glamorized in works of fiction: for example, the romantic hero of the above-mentioned Riders is a half-Gypsy man who steals the beautiful wife of his blond blue-eyed childhood enemy. Even the word ‘gypsy’ with a small ‘g’ has the positive connotation of a free spirit, as in the Fleetwood Mac song ‘Gypsy.’ On the other hand, ‘gyp’ or ‘gip’ is hardly a flattering term, though interestingly, similar expressions exist about other ethnic groups, such as to ‘Jew someone’ or to ‘Welsh on a bet.’

Returning to Hungary, the position of the Roma in that country and other parts of Eastern European is not very enviable. Gypsies in those places experience higher than average unemployment rates, are much poorer than the general populace, and basically live on the margins of society. An alarmingly high proportion of Gypsy children are enrolled in special education classes. Roma activists and outside observers frequently attribute these findings to oppression on the part of the larger community, noting as well that Gypsies have been targeted by nationalist groups, sometimes violently. ‘Native’ Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans are quick to respond that much of what the Roma do – theft, unruliness, and uncontrolled breeding at the taxpayers’ expense being among the things most commonly mentioned – hardly endears them to the rest of the population. After a group of Roma from the Czech Republic attempted to seek asylum in Canada in the mid-1990s, a Maclean’s reader noted that the Czech government had once built special housing for the Roma but that the Roma burned down the dwellings.

The Roma are frequently compared to the Jews, with whom they perished in Hitler’s concentration camps. It is true that the Jews, another diaspora population, often incurred the dislike and even open hostility of the inhabitants of the nations in which they resided. Similarly, like the Jews the Roma at times deliberately chose to separate themselves from the surrounding society: both groups, for instance, have special terms for outsiders (‘goy’ or ‘Gentile’ for the Jews and ‘gadjo’ for the Roma). One significant difference between the Roma and Jews, however, is that while the former group has constituted an underclass, the Jews were and in many ways still are an overclass in the lands they have inhabited: rich, well-educated, and disproportionately represented in prestigious professions like medicine. To illustrate, whereas Roma children are streamed into special education classes, Jewish schools in Hungary are known for their academic excellence to the point that even some non-Jews send their children there. The glaring discrepancy between Jews and Gypsies’ status in countries like Hungary calls into question the charge that the latter’s present misery is entirely due to discrimination from the host society. One might ask why are the Jews, who have also faced fierce prejudice (including, I must admit, in Canada), not living in poverty or filling the rosters of schools for subnormal children.

The situation of Jews versus Gypsies may help explain why unlike the former, the latter have never pushed for an independent nation for themselves. According to columnist Steve Sailer, the Jews were able to create their own country (Israel), but in a homeland of their own, the parasitical Roma would lack a non-Gypsy population to ‘leech off of.’ Nor is returning to their actual homeland – India – a feasible proposition. Not only would a developing nation like India have difficulty absorbing a large essentially non-productive population, but seven centuries away from India have distanced the Roma from that country socially, culturally, and religiously. Even the Romany language is no longer spoken by the bulk of Gypsies in Europe: most have adopted the languages of their host countries. The bond between the Gypsies and the people they left behind in India has long been severed.

Finally, should Canada accept requests for asylum from Roma applicants? I tend to take a libertarian approach to immigration: that is, let everyone in (barring of course those with criminal records), but once they are here, they are on their own (i.e. no tax-funded settlement services, English as a Second Language classes, etcetera). However, since I know such a scenario is unlikely to occur in my lifetime, under the present circumstances I would say that the Roma’s claims for Canada’s protection are fairly weak. So, of course, are many other refugee claims, like that of South African carnival worker Brandon Huntley, who applied for asylum in Canada on the basis that as a White man, he was targeted by Black criminals in his homeland. I do not doubt that Huntley may have been a victim of crime – South Africa is, after all, one of the most violent countries in the world – but whether he was victimized solely because of his skin colour is another matter altogether. Interestingly, I wonder how many people who scoffed at Huntley’s claim of persecution would be the first to call for the acceptance of Roma refugees from Hungary. I have absolutely no problem with Hungarian Gypsies – or Mr. Huntley, for that matter – coming to Canada under other programs, like the Federal Skilled Worker category. However, granting asylum to citizens of Hungary, a democratic country and member of the European Union, comes off as insulting both to Hungary and Canada, in my view. Although it cannot be totally excluded that some individual Hungarian Gypsies may have valid claims for refugee status, Canadian immigration authorities should remain sceptical.

In his book Race and Ethnicity, Belgian sociologist Pierre van den Berghe compares the impact of European colonization on Africa and the Americas. While the former largely retained its original character despite being under European rule, the latter ended up with a predominantly Western culture. As well, race mixing was widespread in the New World but occurred on a much smaller scale in Africa, with the exception of South Africa’s Cape Province. The amount of acculturation and miscegenation moreover did not depend on whether the European power in question took an “assimilationist” approach, as France, Spain and Portugal did, or a “racialist” one, as did Britain and the Netherlands. At the end of the day, the Americas are a “cultural extension of Europe,” whereas Africa is not.

The same observation can be made of Latin America [1] and the Philippines. Though both were under Spain’s control for roughly three centuries, Latin America essentially adopted a Western (Iberian) culture as a result of colonization while the Philippines remained more or less as it had been before the conquest. Similarly, miscegenation between the conquered and conquerors took place extensively in the former region but was fairly negligible in the latter. To paraphrase van den Berghe, Latin America is a cultural extension of Spain; the Philippines is not.

This is not to say that the Philippines was not influenced by three hundred years of Spanish rule. Among Spain’s legacies to the islands were Castilian [2] loan words to the local languages, Spanish personal names of the inhabitants, and perhaps most importantly, Roman Catholicism, today the religion of over 80% of Filipinos. (When it comes to being good Catholics, the Filipinos may have beaten their former colonial masters and the latter’s overseas descendants at their own game. Several years ago the international newswires reported on Father Ener Glotario, a priest in Barranquilla, Colombia who refused to give communion to scantily clad female parishioners. I couldn’t help thinking how much easier Father Glotario’s life would have been if he were stationed in the Philippines, where the women, unlike their Western sisters, generally eschew miniskirts, midriff-baring tops and short shorts.) Yet the Philippines’ status as an Asian country is undisputed not only geographically but also culturally.

In fact, the example of the Philippines provides a powerful counterweight to claims by left- and right-wing ideologues alike that Latin America is not Western and that its “soul” is Indian rather than European. If such were the case, the counter argument might go, why did the region not end up like the Philippines, whose people were conquered by Spain but nonetheless kept their own languages and cultural traditions?

One of the most striking differences between Latin America and the Philippines today lies in the racial composition of their inhabitants. Mestizos [3] form the bulk of Latin America’s population. By contrast, most Filipinos are of indigenous Malay stock, and individuals of mixed Spanish-Malay descent are relatively rare.

What accounted for the low rate of miscegenation between Spaniards and natives in the Philippines? Certainly not a lack of desire by either party. Even clerics succumbed. Spanish chronicler Sinibaldo de Mas attempted to explain why so many Spanish priests in the Philippines broke their vows of celibacy: “The offense is most excusable, especially in young and healthy men placed in the torrid zone… The garb of the native women is very seductive; and the girls, far from being unattainable, consider themselves lucky to attract the attention of the curate, and their mother, father, and relatives share in that sentiment. What virtue and stoicism does not the friar need to possess!” (The good de Mas is perhaps a little too quick to blame the “girls” and their attire for his compatriots’ lust. More likely, the women’s eagerness to couple with curates stemmed from the higher social status that mixed race children in colonial — and according to some sources, modern — Philippines enjoyed compared to their unmixed native counterparts. In addition, I suspect Spanish priests’ fall into temptation was due less to the native women’s “garb” than to the fact that, as Pierre van den Berghe writes in his book Human Family Systems: An Evolutionary View, “celibacy, however saintly, goes against most people’s grain.”)

The main reason for the dearth of Spanish-Filipino mestizos was that few Spaniards ventured to the Philippines. The voyage from Spain to the islands was considerably long. Before the construction of the Panama Canal, it involved going around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. The Philippines in addition lacked natural resources like gold and silver that the Americas had and that might have convinced large numbers of Spaniards to migrate there (indeed, at one point the scarcity of potential riches led Spain to consider abandoning the islands). According to de Mas, in some Philippine villages the friar and/or the mayor were the only white residents.

Whatever the cause, the low incidence of race mixing in the Philippines effectively stopped that country from going down the path of Hispanicization. The offspring of Spanish men and Filipino women [4] may have adopted the culture of their fathers — some mixed race families in the Philippines still speak Spanish among themselves, for instance — but ultimately there were simply not enough Spanish mestizos in the country to have much of an effect on Philippine culture as a whole. Mestizos in Latin America conversely came to constitute the largest racial category in the region, so as a group they managed to maintain and promote the Spanish language and culture.

One giveaway to Latin America’s “Westernness” is the fact that the majority of the population speaks Spanish, not an indigenous language or even a Creole, as their mother tongue. On the other hand, it has been estimated that even at the height of Spanish domination only 10% of Filipinos were able to speak the language of their masters, and undoubtedly fewer still learned it as a mother tongue. And while the Americans who took over the islands in 1898 were much more successful in teaching their Filipino subjects English than the Spaniards were in teaching their language, the reality is that English in the Philippines is a lingua franca and an administrative medium rather than a mother tongue. Neither the Americans nor the Spaniards managed to eradicate the islands’ Asian character.

Going back to van den Berghe’s argument, the example of the Philippines and Latin America shows that regions colonized by the same power may nevertheless turn out quite differently. It also shows how miscegenation can change the course of history. Despite Spain’s assimilationist approach and occasional “successes” in the Philippines (such as religious conversion), the Spaniards failed to acculturate the islands to any significant degree. Spain’s conquest of Latin America on the other hand transformed that region into a part of the Western world. As van den Berghe explains with regard to Africa and the Americas, differences in the Philippines and Latin America themselves rather than racial attitudes on the part of the colonizer were responsible for the different outcomes of European rule in the two regions.

(1) For the purpose of this essay, Latin America will refer only to the Spanish-speaking part of the region.

(2) The term “Castilian” refers to the official language of Spain (as opposed to regional dialects and languages like Galician and Catalan).

(3) Though the term “mestizo” literally means “mixed” in Spanish, for the purpose of this essay the term will refer to individuals of mixed Spanish and Native American descent in the Latin American context and to those of mixed Spanish and Filipino Malay origin in the Philippines.

(4) The opposite combination was virtually non-existent, as even fewer Spanish women than men traveled to the islands.