Italy begins ethnic cleansing plan

[Famous Mortimer]

How is this ethnic cleansing if they're only targeting non-citizens and leaving Roma who are citizens?

[Famous Mortimer]

I've never met a Roma person in real life (actually that's not true, I have one Roma friend whose parents immigrated from Romania and he hates his people) but I've had the same funny exchange about Roma people 4 or 5 times with different leftist Europeans.

Whenever some leftist European brings up American mistreatment of Blacks, I usually bring up European treatment of Roma just to see what they say. No matter how left-wing they are, they assure me "no, that's different, you don't understand" and then explain to me how Roma are tiny percentage of the population but commit huge amounts of crime, how they don't send their kids to school, how the state gives them free housing but they turn it to crap by refusing to take care of it, etc.

[Famous Mortimer]

I've never met a Roma person in real life (actually that's not true, I have one Roma friend whose parents immigrated from Romania and he hates his people) but I've had the same funny exchange about Roma people 4 or 5 times with different leftist Europeans.

Whenever some leftist European brings up American mistreatment of Blacks, I usually bring up European treatment of Roma just to see what they say. No matter how left-wing they are, they assure me "no, that's different, you don't understand" and then explain to me how Roma are tiny percentage of the population but commit huge amounts of crime, how they don't send their kids to school, how the state gives them free housing but they turn it to crap by refusing to take care of it, etc.

Yes, it's pretty interesting to see, in my childhood, we had the American view of Gypsies* (Sigøjner; the name used in the past), we also only had two small communities (Yugoslavian immigrants) of them**. Then people bean to visit the former East Block countries, and they developed a similar view of them as the local East Europeans had, but there was still a lot of people, who didn't visit East Europe (which was mostly a travel destination for the working class and the lower middle class, Prague being the exception), but after the East expansion and the free movement of labour was extended to East Europe, we saw a collective shift in attitude toward Romani (in fact it was why we changed to use Roma instead of Sigøjner, as the other name had suddenly become tained) toward a similar attitude as East Europeans.

It should be said that some of this are also caused by the fact that Romani identity are very much clan and family based, so they have a weaker national identity, so Romani who do well in more respectful job (here I mean white collar) and visual look like their majority neighbours often hide their Romani identity, which means that successful Romani simply begins to identify themselves as non-Romani, which ironic creates a greater focus on the Romani in less respectful jobs.

*That they was oh so romantic and a free people etc.

**While you can find description of a native Gypsy population in Denmark on wikipedia, this group doesn't exist, the traditional travelling people in Denmark wasn't related to Romani , but was split in two population, one Danish and another Low German.

I've never seen any studies (and I doubt studies could be done without political meddling) but I get the impression from talking to people that the Roma community is like 99% dysfunctional and that even sympathetic governments have trouble finding positive role models to prop up as tokens.

Assimilated Roma just opting out of the identity would explain that.

My Roma friend didn't mention he was Roma until months after I'd known him and the topic of Roma came up by chance. I never would have known otherwise. He looks just like a typical person of Southern European descent.