Although battles have avoided Transcarpathia so far, the circumstances that changed because of the war - such as rising prices, power cuts and deteriorating infrastructure - have caused many people to leave the region over the past two years. Recently, news about the stricter Ukrainian conscription process have tended to boost the number of arrivals, especially those fleeing across the borders.
We only have estimates on the number of Hungarians in Transcarpathia and the proportion of Roma among them, thus we cannot know for sure how many left after the war broke out. Although many people believe that the majority of Hungarians arriving from Transcarpathia are Roma, this is not the case; the majority of Transcarpathian Roma however have Hungarian as a mother tongue and a Hungarian identity. It is also unknown how many of them have Hungarian citizenship. Although they receive the same state support as refugees with Ukrainian citizenship, experience shows that Hungarian citizenship actually slows down and complicates many administrative processes.
In the last decade, many men from Transcarpathia came to Hungary, almost exclusively to work in the construction industry, often in the black economy. A similar tendency can be noticed in the labour markets of Slovakia, Austria and Germany. As a result, there were only a few Trancarpathian Roma families among those who fled to Hungary after 24 February 2022, whose members had no connection at all to the Hungarian labour market before the outbreak of the war. For them, the war brought family reunification burdened by difficulties: the heads of families typically lived in workers' hostels, arranged officially or privately, where other family members could not join them, and many of them were living together for the first time, which brought new tensions to the surface.
Despite the fact that some members of the Transcarpathian Roma families had already lived in Hungary before the war, they had only limited knowledge of the place and country and they lived in isolation from society just like those who stayed at home. The labour market is still dominated by men, almost all of whom are employed in the construction industry. Moreover, confidence in more secure, declared work, which, on the other hand is not paid daily, is very low. The lack of confidence is mutual: these people are not welcome in the more stable positions. In Hungary, as in Transcarpathia, women among these refugees only rarely take up jobs (usually as kitchen helpers or cleaners), and like men, they often work in the black economy. The state is trying to steer Ukrainian refugees towards the rental market, but this is not an option for everyone. Public hostels that are still open are usually inhabited by Trancarpathian Roma people who are almost completely excluded from the housing market.
Some of the refugees are forced to help their family members who have stayed in Ukraine, either financially or by providing various consumer goods and utensils (e.g. durable food, warm clothes, sheets). For the Transcarpathian Roma people, this has almost become a necessity, since more than two years after the outbreak of the war, the sustenance (ie. food supply) of a family in a Transcarpathian Roma settlement depends largely on whether family members who have left Ukraine can send money or not.
The life of the Transcarpathian Roma in Ukraine was characterised by double exclusion: they were excluded from Ukrainian society because they spoke Hungarian, but they were also excluded from minority Hungarian society because of their Roma origin. In Transcarpathia, they live predominantly in so-called "gypsy camps" on the outskirts of villages and towns. The largest segregated camps, among others, are the one in Mukachevo, where about 7,000 Roma lived before the outbreak of the war, and the one in Berehovo, where about 6,000 Roma lived. In Berehovo, the local government built a 2.5 m high wall to separate the Roma's extreme poverty from the everyday life of the town. Roma people in Ukraine lived even more on the margins of society than the Roma in Hungary, and now that they came to Hungary, their situation is similar, only without a wall.
Research on the Transcarpathian Roma living in refugee shelters in Budapest shows that although they are a diverse group in terms of economic opportunities, place of residence and from a socio-cultural aspect, what they have in common is that they are only to a lesser extent or not at all part of the Transcarpathian Hungarian/Ukrainian community and are less integrated into society than the Hungarian Roma people. Support organisations were confronted with the fact that they are not familiar with the lifestyle, culture, strategies and motivations of the typically large, extended Transcarpathian Roma families, despite knowing their language, traditional Roma culture and their strategies for coping with poverty.
The characteristics of this group are very different from those of the families encountered in Hungarian social work, as they come from a different country and a different society, thus their social disadvantages and responses to them are also different from those of the poor and/or Roma in Hungary.
Experts agreed that without targeted assistance they have no chance of breaking out of this situation on their own. Of course, there are some positive examples, as mentioned by Ábel Kiss, head of the Dorcas Ministries (a Christian charity organisation) in Debrecen: in Eastern Hungary, some families have been able to buy a house from their savings and have been able to start anew and create an independent life. It is important to talk about these cases, but their successes do not mean that the underlying factors causing segregation have been eliminated.
The integration of Hungarian-speaking Roma from Transcarpathia is difficult not only because there is no viable Roma strategy provided by the state, or because the government has a one-size-fits-all approach to refugees coming from Ukraine, but also because these communities live in a conceptual framework that is different from that of the Roma in Hungary.
Organisations working with Transcarpathian Roma people observed that nowadays social helpers have to let go of the hands of the affected people earlier than it would be ideal: if there is no abuse within the family and they make sure that their mentees are not victims of usury or prostitution, that is enough, there is no capacity for more help.
Similarly to Hungary, the social integration of Roma in Ukraine has not been particularly successful. From Transcarpathia, most people came to Hungary from extreme poverty and isolation, typically after educational segregation transcending generations. There are also historical and structural reasons for this: education was completely different in Soviet times, the grandparents' generation participated in education because it was compulsory, they learned to read and write, many of them acquired a profession, which integrated them to some extent, or at least made them less segregated. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the education system in Ukraine changed, the world around the Roma communities fell apart, so the parents' generation participated less and less in state education, and this trend continued for their children as well.
According to the experts interviewed, the vast majority of adults arriving in Hungary have completed only the first four grades of elementary school, the majority of those over 30 are completely illiterate, Hungarian is sometimes only their spoken language, and they can write - to some extent - in Cyrillic. A number of civil and international organisations organise catch-up sessions, which at least enable children to participate in the school system by teaching them basic skills such as how to understand their roles (relations with teachers and peers), how to use a handkerchief and the toilet, since the children's fallback is mostly due to a lack of acquired skills rather than a lack of ability. Lilla Eredics, a researcher at Romaversitas, told us that although most of the Transcarpathian Roma children living in Hungary are now enrolled in state education, many of them do not attend school. School attendance is difficult to force from the outside, given that already for their parents school has never been an institution to offer hope and perspective, but rather a source of fear.
The Hungarian asylum system treats all arrivals as a uniform group and it is not equipped to deal with exceptions. The government looks at the already stigmatised group of Transcarpathian Roma as potential new taxpayers, and the whole benefit system is based on the idea that those of working age should go to work. However, as mentioned in our previous article, there will always be people who, for some reason, will not participate in the labour market and will never be self-sufficient. A lot of action and effort would be needed in order to overcome the dependency on benefits of Transcarpathian Roma people and to help them become self-sufficient, and it is a long way until someone becomes a taxpayer. To put it simply: illiterates coming from extreme poverty will not write a CV.
As in the case of all refugees coming from Ukraine, the question regarding Roma communities is what will happen after the end of the war. What is clear is that the Transcarpathian Roma are not living in ideal conditions, either in Ukraine or in Hungary. It is foreseeable that life in post-war Transcarpathia will be very difficult, and the government expects it to be even more difficult for the Hungarian communities. Most Roma coming from there live in better conditions in Hungary than in Ukraine, and the education system would prefer to keep some of them here, but their true home is in Transcarpathia, and so is their social network.
It remains to be seen what the government's strategy will be regarding the future of Ukrainian refugees in general once the war is over. Will there be some kind of government incentive system to encourage refugees to stay in order to reduce the labour shortage in Hungary, or will there be a passive/active promotion of return? Even before the outbreak of the war, the government's aim was to attract as many people from Ukraine as possible to work in Hungary. According to government sources this strategy will not change, as reflected in the new law on national workers (the guest worker law). However, only a proportion of those who fled the war are suitable to work in the positions that the government wants to fill with guest workers.
The issue is even more complex for the Hungarian-speaking Transcarpathian Roma people: on the one hand, the reinvigoration of the Hungarian-speaking community in Transcarpathia is one of the main concerns, which, if there is political will, can easily be framed as a way to prosper in the homeland, while on the other hand, labour market considerations, mainly in the construction industry, are at stake.
This article was written in the framework of The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI) project. TEFI is a collaboration of independent publishers from Central and Eastern Europe, to foster common thinking and cooperation on European security issues in the region. The project aims to promote knowledge sharing in the European press and contribute to a more resilient European democracy.
Members of the consortium are 444 (Hungary), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), SME (Slovakia), PressOne (Romania), and Bellingcat (The Netherlands).
The TEFI project is co-financed by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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