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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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There's also the reality of the diaspora. There's no way to avoid foreign thought in elections when so many voters live abroad. There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.

There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.

What percentage of that diaspora is gypsies, though? I observe that at least here in America, if you hear that somebody is “Romanian” — and in America, this is almost always in the context of learning that law enforcement has broken up some ring of professional thieves comprised of “Romanian immigrants — Romanian nearly always means “Roma” and not ethnic Romanian-speakers. My understanding is that this is mostly true throughout Western Europe, although I have no doubt that some reasonable number of actual Romanians also emigrated, particularly during the Ceaucescu years.

There's a lot of actual Romanians who've immigrated. You don't notice them because like eastern european immigrants in general, they're largely functional educated middle class people, and most Americans just think they're some kind of slav(they are not). I've met plenty of people from Romania, who identify as Romanian, would find a confusion with gypsies very offensive and often insist that roma be referred to as gypsies to avoid confusion.

In Western Europe they're a bit more visible because Romanian immigrants to Western Europe are more likely to be working class, although still usually non-criminal. There are a lot of them. Romanian immigration(and my understanding was that this is actual Romanians who took normal working class jobs from normal working class brits) was one of the complaints from the Brexiteers. Again, you're more likely to see a news story about a specific "Romanian" or group of "Romanians" who are actually gypsies, but that's because gypsies are all criminals that no sane person wants in their country, so they get arrested a lot.