Why Do Swedish Brides Have Coins In Their Shoes?

To clarify, this is not laundering, it’s simply tax evasion. He is hiding his money in a swiss bank rather than keeping it in an american one or his house where the IRS can ask questions about where it came from. He then can launder the money which means to make it taxable (Ex. buying a business and giving yourself a massive fake salary which comes from the illegal money). In this case though Jordans money isn’t illegal like a drug dealers, he just doesnt want to pay tax so he wouldnt need to launder it.

I have been perusal several articles for several hours from from different sources, it has been confusing to know if im catching up with the information that im required to be watched from the same staff, because i get this article as it has been some sort of misinterpretation, stressful and confusing will be back here by noon, apologies for it, thank you for your understanding

To add, if you own a food store and someone buys a sandwich and a soda, you don’t how the person obtained the cash they are paying you with. Maybe they stole it from their granny, maybe they performed honest labor for it, your only real concern is that the money they give you isn’t counterfeit. How is depositing cash in a bank any different?.

Why make the assumption that the other is dirty? The banker doesn’t know exactly how Jordan obtained his cash and the bank seemed very legitimate. You are considered as a matter of law and practical politeness innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. There are corrupt prosecutors who will go after innocent people just to make a name for themselves.

this scene is legendary, Martin Scorsese is basically explaining how all the greedy rich people store their massive amounts of wealth overseas to Switzerland instead of giving money to their underpaid employees, contractors, and overall community. The whole point of money is to be a medium of exchange but if giant amounts of money aren’t being used at all, its essentially the same thing as having no money at all. This scene was awesome but i feel like burning the swiss people alive for giving the methods to make this happen.

This movie is very informative. It shows us how the capitalism works: more, more, more! Belfort is the personification of the capitalism. More money, drugs and xxx, this is what our system needs: exceeding every limits. He became so rich because of us, the 99%. We want to be also rich and this is why we buy these worthless stocks. I love “The Big Short” as well. Both movies show us in a different way how the economics work.

I’m not Romani, I’m Hmong, but their history is really similar to our history. Our people migrated around a lot because of persecution and annexation. Started in China and settled all over South East Asia. Most of our people died building The Great Wall and kept in slavery for a long time. Still no reparations to this day because they’re trying to erase our history. The only way one would know is story passed on down by their families.

All I can say is I was a restaurant manager and every single time gypsies came in we had a problem. Not 1 or 2 times, but 16 for 16 100%. And it was the same thing every time, customize everything then complain that thats not what was on the menu, then eat 80% of the food then try to send it back and get a refund, then when I wouldn’t give it to them they would throw stuff on the floor and threaten my staff.

My take on the whole situation with the Roma people as doctor working in a public hospital in Bulgaria, where a good amount of the patients are Romani is that a big problem for them is their clan structure. Almost all of the ones that are living in poverty belong to something like a clan run by a criminal boss( we call it a gypsy baron) who is responsible for the “well being” of his subjects – forbids them to be educated in order to keep the status quo, forces them to work criminal jobs like prostitution or begging and most importantly collects money from political parties during election and orders his people who to vote for – that’s why this system is tolerated. I didn’t see anything meaningful in this article how to integrate the Roma, just raising some awareness. A good example for Roma people that broke off from this system in Bulgaria are the ones that joined religious sects, like seventh day Adventists. They are usually educated and don’t live in poverty, so maybe that’s one way.

Situation from Serbia: My sister had in her class a Roma girl, with great grades, who wanted to become a doctor. But her grandfather arranged her a marriage to a guy that 10 years older and lived in Austria. Her father could not stand to his father. She was 14. Many Roma children are born at home. And these births are never reported, so they have no ID. And when these children have children of their own, they could not be reported as their mother did not have an ID. They could not travel, go to school, doctor. They do not exist. Some even do not know when or where they are born. Problem is that if they want to join surrounding society, they are banished from Roma. But there is a fear that other would not accept them, so they become alone. PS. When I got to university I was so happy to see Roma-looking guy. But it turned out, it was a student from Bangladesh.

I was always friends with Roma since I was a child I had two best friends in my class we would spend everyday together then one of them disappeared. We later found out she was sold by her family to be married she was 9. My other best friend disappeared at 11 also sold to a man. As I grew up I witnessed so many disgusting things that the Roma did they would have so many children that the children themselves didn’t know their names bcs they never got named. After my friends were sold I stayed away from Roma people in my city. I know there are those who live normal lives and I respect them but those who still follow their traditions so closely they sell their own daughters as children disgust me and no matter what I can’t see past that.

In Lithuania we had a big problem were we were trying to integrate Roma people into our society, but it was hard for them to keep children in school, especially girls. And then without education the poverty circle kept going, so Roma people made a living selling drugs in their village outside of the city. A few years ago social housing was provided for Roma people in different parts of town to encourage integration into general society. I hope that with these measures they can integrate well and have the social support needed to keep children in schools. Last year we had a first Roma restaurant open in the capital and it’s doing pretty well.

I’m from Europe, and I’ll say that, whilst it’s sad, stereotypes exist from a reason and they don’t come from nowhere. We’ve had problems in the past with train cancellations on the main lines due to gypsies stealing the metal from the tracks and copper out of the wires. Gypsy camps are notorious as places of violence, and when they’re out they’re infamous for acting like complete arseholes for no reason – verbally abusing folks for no reason. They often pitch up in fields, on grass verges, and leave a huge mess, they have no respect for the land they’re usually illegally camping on, and are a major headache for the farmer if they decide to use one of his fields, one of our Conservative MPs even called them “scum” in 2002 in regards to the nightmare they had caused his constituency. About a decade ago, my country had a very low opinion of Romanians because Romanians were rare in our country back then, and the only exposure must of us had had to “Romanians” were violent gypsies from Romania who called themselves “Roma”, leading many to assume all Romanians must be like that, fortunately more genuine Romanians have arrived since.

As an Italian who has had a terrible experience with Romani people (mugged once, scammed, and threatened), I personally stopped giving a crap about the Romani. I have tried being positive and kind to them, but something about their culture is absolutely atrocious. It’s like even when I try being honest with them and try giving them a hand by giving fresh fruit or a bottle of water to them whenever I do encounter them in my local park, they just give me a weird look and sometimes tell me to leave. Ever since I got mugged by one of them for 11 lousy euros, I just stopped giving and stop caring for them. You may think only a small percentage of people in Europe hate them and discriminate against them, but the truth is that almost every European absolutely openly despises them, including me now.

I’ve interacted with Roma exactly six times that I know of, and in three different countries. All six encounters shared one unifying feature. Petty crime. In four interactions, the Roma stole or were stealing something from me or someone else. In two, they were actively scamming people. I don’t like to generalize about any group based on the actions of such a small sample, but it’s hard for me to see the Roma in any other way.

I thought I didn’t judge people by their heritage, culture, religion, race, until I got to know the Roma people in various countries around Europe. Initially I was one of the people who got in to verbal arguments with people that “we should never judge any people because of their….” when I heard people talking ill of the Roma people which I didn’t know of, but did eventually. Am sure there are good Roma people, but 99.9% of the Roma people I have come across has deeply depressed and upset me. How vulgar and uncultured (outside their culture, which is where they choose to live but not follow the law of the lands) they can be and how proud they are of it. The woman in the interview should point out how many social, education, labor programs there are in most European countries of which they just do not take advantage and how this leads to discrimination. Why does she not explain how the Roma people pass their children around to different mothers in different streets to beg to ultimately hand this money over to papa Roma guy? Give them more power? What? How about starting the change from the family unit and work the way out and up? Am sorry. But it’s the truth from my experience.

I can say a thing or two about the Bulgarian Integration plan. Speaking from direct experience, it’s not rooted in racism. It attempts to integrate Roma people in normal society by providing work opportunities, education and improving the standard of living. A lot of schools here are so low in students that the teachers literally go from door to door and beg Roma parents to send there children to school. Even the free abortion thing is done not to limit the number of Roma but because a lot of underage girls leave school when they become pregnant. There are also contraception and vaccination campaigns being done with the help of health mediators. Most of the time these mediators are Roma themselves. Granted your average Bulgarian feels and says a bunch of racist things about the Roma people, but I can assure you the integration program is really trying to help these people improve their lives and become part of society. I don’t believe it’s succeeding much but it is trying.

This report falls into the cliché of presenting the discrimination of Gipsies as something completely inexplicable. It doesn’t make the slightest attempt to explain why Gipsies are hated or disliked in so many places. Quite a few Roma have integrated and are now indistinguishable for ‘payos’ – as Gipsies call everyone else, in Spain. But Roma living in Gipsie-majority communities make terrible neighbours. They refuse to follow laws and common-sense rules; and are often ready to resort to violence if they are called-out. Plus many of them engage in drug traffic, robbery, extortion and similar low-profile crimes.

It is common that when we talk about the Roma, in Spain, where I live, racist comments and prejudices are part of the conversation. However, this mini documentary has overlooked something that happens in Spain and according to the comment section of this article, it also happens in other countries and that is that the Spanish government has been giving educational aid to this ethnic group for years to promote studies among them, however, the vast majority of them abandon their studies around the age of 14, especially women who are married and forced to maintain their virginity until marriage so as not to be a “disgrace to their family and their culture” . The lack of education means that they have to work in precarious jobs and many end up in the drug business, occupying other people’s houses and stealing. And the truth is that people in general turn away from people who lead this kind of life, whether they are Roma or not, but the fact that most of them are in some way pressured to follow this kind of life for the sake of “following their culture and traditions”, prevents greater harmony between this ethnic group and the rest of Spain. However, it is true that in recent years some Roma families have allowed their children to finish their secondary education and some even pursue university studies, unfortunately they are the 1% of their population and these are usually men, but I have had the pleasure to meet and become friends with some of them.

Im so tired of this “racism” word being thrown around when we talk about gypsies. Most of us are not racist, but living a lifetime around them made us learn to keep our pockets safe, because if you will be stolen from in Europe, it will be a gypsy 99.99% of times. Im from Romania, where we have the biggest population of gypsies and life is not pleasant around them, to be fair. Im lucky to have a gypsy community in my village that is more civilized and got integrated well with the rest, but you still have your weekly fight and police visit. The thing only gets worse when you go to bigger towns and cities, pickpockets and scammers are everywhere, all gypsy. You can also read comments from different countries like France or Germany, where many migrated from Romania after joining EU, the stories said there are not hood either. Most countries tried to integrate them, but is so hard when their culture is so full of anti-social behavior.

I live 100 meters away from the biggest population of Roma people in spain and I can tell you from my own experience that the Roma people can be very nice but you also need to look out with them. How much I see them pickpocket, intimitade people, fighting, throwing trash where ever they go etc. They do not allow any “White” spanish person in their circle unless you are from the goverment or NGO and you have something that helps them or is “free” etc. I have a good friend who is Roma and he is very succesful but he himself said that they are very close minded people and education is not the main priority in their culture. He tried once to have a “White” spanish girlfriend and told his mom and she said she can never be part of the family and better not to tell the rest. All in all not everything is done well by the goverment here at all regarding this ethnic group but the group itself needs to be willing to integrate as well.

Well back in Portugal the gypsies had a lot of criminals, I was in service and one of our man was stabbed by a gypsie and ended badly for all of them when 2 trucks of paratroopers came to their camping site and beat the shit of everyone and burned everything. Not talking about when I was a teenager and had to fight a few during my time I lived in an area bordering a “bairro” of gypsies. Today we have then coming from Romania pocket picking in Lisbon, Porto and Algarve. So no good memories from them and so far I don’t see them trying to integrate in our society.

Sigh Anyone else just… confused and overwhelmed with mixed emotions about Romani people? On one hand i dont want to generalize them as just “bad people” just because of their ethnicity, but on the other hand a lot of people had negative experiences with them including myself, but Romani dont seem to want to change. Should we help them? Educate them? Maybe, that would be nice, but who is going to do all of that, and how? The people who hate them do have a decently good point: Romani have made a pretty bad name for themselves so that makes it pretty hard to help them. It doesnt help that whenever these people commit crimes in an X country, the news are usually along the lines “Person from X country did crime”, and so if you are actually from that country it doesnt feel fair to be associated with the Romani people. And so the cycle begins: Romani did bad thing in X, X people gain bad reputation for something they didnt do, so then X people hate Romani. So you can see how this is just a complicated mess to solve. The easy and obvious answer is “Be the better person and try to help Romani people”, but unfortunately not all people are that nice, which is understandable, it doesnt feel fair to instantly accept someone who did horrible things to you. And im over here stuck in the middle of this unable to form a proper opinion, with both anger and pity, two very different emotions, fighting in my brain.

I visited Europe and helped with some charity events. At one event we were feeding kids in attendance. They would line up and we would give them box lunches. I and others noticed that some of the kids would re-enter the line to get more meals. This meant that other kids might not get their meal. All of those trying to get a second meal were Roma kids. The stereotype of Gypsies being thieves is based on personal experiences. It wasn’t just made up.

Watching this as a Slovak, this article feels completely disconnected from reality. Sure, there are real racists among us, but I believe I’m speaking for most of us here that we are not racist, we just see how most of these people behave and we’ve learned how to behave accordingly. If 95% of people you’ve ever met from some community are vulgar, inadaptable and stinky people from a nearby ghetto and you’ve often seen them take drugs and always cause mess, it’s perfectly normal to expect it from the next person of this community you meet too. Of course, there are racist idiots who will meet a well-dressed, classy and clearly educated Romani person somewhere in a bank and they’ll look down on him anyway but those are just an extremist minority of the population that won’t be helped by perusal articles like these.

Live in Sweden and remember when many years ago I saw a Roma family outside a department store, helped the woman put on a Roma dress (such a big and wide one) and saw how they fixed the hook in it (a lot of things got lost in it the store that day).\r In the neighboring village, a Finnish Swede had a store, she has told that once a family of Roma came in and how the Roma woman, who was the mother, told her adult sons to steal as much as possible while she herself kept the woman in the till. The mother said this in Finnish, not knowing that the shop owner was Finnish. Of course they yelled that she was racist when she kicked them out.

While there is a lot of racism going towards the rroma community, to be fair, on the ground the situation is not so simple. Growing up and living all my life near one of the largest gypsy communities in Eastern Europe, Gârcini, in the Romanian county of Brașov, I can tell you from my own life-long experience that people that are part of the gypsy community are also the people that are most likely to exhibit anti-social behaviour. For starters, very often you see them playing loud music (manele in 99% of the times) on the bus, eating sun flower seeds and just littering the bus floor, throwing trash right out on the streets, and generally making a lot of mess. They also have a tendency to be violent, not rarely I’ve seen them randomly breaking things like street signs, benches, street recycle bins etc. Also, the two times I got beaten up in my 22 years of life, were by some members of a kinda-notorious gypsy family/clan, with whom I had absolutely no bussines with, they just came up to me and starting harassing me, then started beating me up without stealing anything from me. They just did it because they could… and I do know alot of similar cases. While I am not racist, at all, I cannot deny the reality. I kind of understand why this kind of anti-social behavior is so often encountered in the rroma community. Due to centuries of oppression from white folks, they formed a culture around opposing what we normally see as ‘civilization’, maybe because they collectively associate it with said oppression, and the state is surely not helping at all.

It’s not possible to solve the problem of discrimination and persecution by only portraying them as victims. Those who are seen as “problematic” and criminal are those who live in parallel societies, with internal laws and norms which crashes with their surrounding society. Let’s be honest, some Romani are stigmatized as thieves, beggars, scammers, squatters and as posing a hygienic health risk by what people experience. Unless they are willing to really take effective measures to combat those aspects of those parts of Romani culture, they will never lose their stigma of being problematic, and will never be regarded as fully citizens of their host countries. You can not demand that racism and discrimination should magically seize to exist, not without making any effort to weed out the troubling aspects of your culture. Like it or not, but as a species we’re hardwired to discriminate and stereotype.

The article fails to present the reasons of this discrimination towards gypsies. They are very often associated with crimes and they choose to remain outside the society. For example in Greece, there was a huge wave of immigrants coming from Albania during the 90’s. While in the beginning they were met with discrimination eventually they were fully integrated into the Greek society. They went to school, they worked, they opened business etc. Gypsies on the other hand never tried to become part of the society.

“That white Europeans don’t have the moral responsibility to do something….” This is disingenuous, dishonest and false. Europe has given housing, education, and spent, and spent and spent. But can the EU force a Roma mother to read to her child? To pick up a mop and scrub her floor? What do the Roma actually want that has not been given?

The gypsy problem, at least here in the Balkans, is that the governments do/did try a lot of times to integrate the societies into the country’s society (by offering apartments for free, help in education, including giving free points for university enrollment) and ultimately failed in it. However this whole process has a lot of problems and rabbit holes that it’s not really simple. Many births aren’t reported and hence the children don’t “exist” and hence don’t have the paperwork/ID/health insurance. There is a large stigma towards Roma who try to educate themselves and very often get no support from their family and because of that you can’t really educated a Roma child if it “doesn’t exist” and their parents don’t WANT the child educated. The parent in this situation decides if their kid will go to school or not even though it is punishable by law if you don’t give your child elementary education, however, you can’t punish someone who doesn’t exist. Society doesn’t even help the situation either, with a decent minority, many of Roma are decent and educated members of society, however a vast majority doesn’t even integrate. They tend to do criminal activity like theft (money, metals, they also tend to illegally connect to electricity, water, sewage etc) and drug dealing BUT also they don’t integrate well with society, they tend to be very filthy, they tend to cause unrest in apartment buildings, they also beg and most people don’t have a high opinion of them because of all this negative experience from a majority of a community.

As a European (and this still sounds racist) – there’s a huge difference between pattern recognition and racism. Americans don’t like other races because they look / smell different and because their parents raise them that way. In Europe we don’t care about your skin color or smell. We care about how you and your people act. If 90% of interactions you’ve had with a certain group are bad, chances are high you’re not gonna like the group. There’s a big difference between blatant racism and negative prejudice based on actual real life experiences you’ve made YOURSELF instead of just being told about by parents and friends. But I wouldn’t expect any American to understand this. Also what’s said in the article: Europeans need to do something against racial imbalances and the nomadic life-style of the Romani – like – no girl. Most Romani do not pursue higher education, leading to them not getting a lot of monetary compensation for their work if they decide to do so. They are making their own integration as hard as possible and now blame it on other races. This shit mag fly in America but not over here. Actions have consequences.

I meet a guy who was in the Spanish military a few years ago. He compared them to locusts and felt Europe would be better off if they were wiped out. He said in Spain that a majority of their criminals were gypsies. I had thought they were a myth before talking to this guy at length. He was actually my calculus tutor before you call him a dumb racist (might have been the latter). My fiancee who works at a major theme park in florida has noted that gypses or “Roma” will frequently come in and use their children to help steal things and will make everyone’s lives miserable around them. Unpopular views and experiences…

It’s not a totally undeserved stigmata. They are not stigmatised because they like to travel and are lovely people, they are stigmatised because they often live a stereotype life and bring stereotype problems with them. When a group don’t live by the rules of the majority of citizen, no matter where they come from, they will get rejected. That’s not racist, that’s human behavior.

I travel quite a bit and it’s very unfortunate. The only Roma people I’ve met were either trying to rob me or scam me. I was forced to defend myself on two occasions. I caught a ten year old girl picking my pocket in Naples. I gave her all the cash I had on me, it made me So profoundly sad, I am in the corner of every downtrodden people, and I hate the racism, they face. And I’m in favor of what ever it takes to get any group out of poverty but you have to meet mainstream society half way.

First, the words Roma and Romani are not universally accepted by the “Roma” peoples across Europe. In Portugal they call themselves Ciganos and in Spain they are Gitanos. Both words mean Gypsy and they are very proud of it. Romani has a hint of Latinx, a word made up by white liberals and imposed on people whether or not they identify as such. This article does a great job of ignoring the complicated nuances of the relations between Romani and society at large. The article is all about how Romani are oppressed by Europeans, the implication being that Europeams are all racists. Truth is, some of the most racist things I ever heard came from the mouths of Gypsies. And they are not shy about expressing their prejudices to your face. At no point in the article do they mention the criminal culture of the Romani, the patriarchal sexism and violence, the self segregation and xenophobia of all other races. The article ignores all of that and expects you to ingore it too. It’s not journalism if you leave out the bits that don’t massage your narrative.

I went to school with some Romani and it wasn’t pleasant to say the least. Most of them didn’t really care about hygiene or education, but the biggest problem was their aggression towards us. The boys would constantly mock, tease and assault us whether it was verbally or physicaly. I have a younger sister and I’m concerned about hor going to school with such kids which is, I think, understandable. I don’t want to say that they are mostly bad people, there are regions where they are polite, clean and well educated, but those who aren’t should become somehow. The thing I also want to point out is that they have a bit more rights than the natives since they are considered a minority and most government bodies won’t even interact with them so they have the freedom to cause harm to society. I’m not a specialist nor a professional in the field of social engineering but I think that they should be socialized a bit and introduced to our coulture since I believe that there is a clash between their culture and ours. Don’t take the comment as hateful or negative, it’s just reality, but I’m always open for debate.

im a Mailman in Switzeland, one day i saw a White van with Irish plates parked up in my small town, its pretty unusual, then i noticed 3-4 Romas going all over the place door to door, they were trying to scam elderly people in the town to buy new roof guttering installations probably marked up 3-4 times what they are worth. Now having grown up in NZ my english is on par with theirs so i ask them where they’re from, the oldest one immediately got hostile, as ive clearly interupted them in their money making scheme. i called the cops which eventually had them move along, apparently they had already done so from several other towns. Theyre not hated because theyre Romas, theyre hated because they really do just bring trouble and petty crime with them wherever they go

I am Romani and I will admit without issue that we have massive issues in our values and culture that leads towards crime and just being generally bad actors in society I do not know why, but my family was very, very far removed from the old value system and it’s for the better. We should preserve the good parts of our culture and realie that we need to be decent members of society if we want to be accepted

I found this to be an interesting place for me to start researching the Romani people. I’m from the US and the only insight I get has been from tv and movies (which isn’t the best). I know just about nothing that isn’t a stereotype I’ve heard. In school we are taught about the Jewish holocaust but we never really hear of the other groups of people who were killed during the holocaust as well. Thank you for enlightening me and helping me along my journey of learning more about the people and culture.

My culture as a part-roma white-looking girl has been sort of taken from me by my great grandfather. He abused my italian/Roma great grandmother and grandmother out of her culture in suburban America and I had no idea my people had to go through this because of minority erasure. I want to know more of my culture Roma-wise and not just the Italian, German, and Ashkenazi parts. I sympathize with the discriminated Roma who aren’t as white looking as me or not as Americanized as me.

It’s sad but I have had two experiences with Roma and they were really negative so it’s hard for me to get over it. I also don’t know any other Roma so in my mentality it’s hard to see it as isolated incidents. I always have know that they were stereotyped and unfortunately the experiences I had only reenforced those stereotypes. The history of oppression does explain some concerns to an extent and the circle of poverty but in some ways still doesn’t justify if a group continues to use that as an excuse for how they treat other people.

I remember as a kid their was a huge field near our house and it was full of Romani families and a lot of people hated them but a lot including my family liked them the men repaired things and the women did beautiful knitting they knitted my cousins christening shawl and also me and my sister played with the kids and if my parents wanted to go out they Romani babysat us and were so nice one time my parents went to a wedding that was for adults and people over the age of 16 only and my parents would be gone for the weekend so we stayed with the Romani and their trailers were beautiful when they were eventually moved on I cried for ages and I remember hugging the kids who were my friends and some of the female adults and sobbing please don’t go and they said we have no choise we’re so sorry but I found them lovely warm people and I didn’t notice that they had darker skin than me and my Sister as she’s blonde and I’m redhead and we’re very fair and also I remember a young female maybe in her teens and I used to say your so pretty you remind me of Esmeralda and I showed her my Esmeralda Barbie she laughed saying why thank you think I gave her the doll to keep

Wait wait wait, I’m all for everything that this article says, but I do see an important oversight here. Everything is “people should treat Roma perfectly, like they are family”, “Countries should give Roma respect”, “Organizations should cater to Roma needs” etc. And that is great and I’m all for it, but I don’t see anywhere about Roma people doing a self examination, why do some groups of roma people behave in very inappropiate ways. The thing is the article makes it seem like there is absolutely no reason for people having a poor view on Roma people, but if there was no reason well there probably wouldn’t be a poor view right? Get what I’m saying? I think if we are to advance socially everybody should take responsability, not just outside groups. When you approach a person that is having personal problems (be it depression, drugs or whatever) you don’t tell him “oh don’t worry you sit back and change nothing, do no self examination, I’ll change everyone around you first”. And of course I’m not talking about changing their culture, I’m talking about changing things that affect others negatively.

I’m a Rudar on my mother’s side from România, which is supposedly a subset of the Roma people, although the exact origins of the Rudars(or in English Boyash) aren’t entirely clear. Despite supposedly being related to the gypsies, we don’t speak romani, we don’t play the same kind of music, and we don’t commit crimes. Instead, we mostly work, we do carpentry and masonry. My grandfather used to do carpentry on the side when he wasn’t working on the railroads. Outside of some of the dress, there is almost nothing in common between us and the gypsies, in fact the latter mostly hate us, yet we’re still called romani. The idea that there’s no such thing as a gypsy lifestyle, that being a gypsy is an ethnicity identical to being a roma, is a lie. There is no one, single romani culture, every single tribe is different. The Romanian roma are different from the Hungarian roma, who both have almost nothing in common with the Spanish and Welsh roma. There is no sense of fraternity or solidarity between “us,” if you go to România you’ll see big palaces built by gypsies who’ve made their money primarily off of drug and human trafficking(50% of victims from Eastern Europe, I believe are gypsy girls) right next door to a family of gypsies who live with about the same standard of living as people did in the 18th century, and live off of begging and petty thievery. The idea that integrating more gypsies is a destructive and racist process, or that somehow a huge amount of culture will be lost, is absurd.