Europe's unwanted: the controversy over France's recent deportations of Roma, or Gypsies, has highlighted their plight.

• Author: Daley, Suzanne
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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Flortina Ghita, 21, and her family live in shacks made of carpets, scraps of corrugated tin, and plastic sheeting not far from railroad tracks in Constanta, Romania's second-largest city. Their only source of water is a train station more than a mile away.

Ghita says the Romanian government has told her family to fill out forms to apply for housing, but none of them can read. Her 5-year-old son is not in school, she says, because she cannot afford the clothing, notebooks, and class fees.

The Ghitas are Roma, also known as Gypsies. Like most Roma, they live in dire poverty and face entrenched discrimination.

Fed up with life in Romania, thousands of Roma have packed their bags in the last few years and headed across the porous borders of the European Union for the relative wealth of countries like France and Italy.

But things haven't been much better for Roma in Western Europe, where they've struggled to find work and most live in ragged encampments on the outskirts of cities. With little education and few practical skills, some Roma have found jobs collecting scrap iron or painting houses. But others have signed up for welfare or ended up begging or stealing, which has fueled resentment among locals.

The situation came to a head over the summer in France, when President Nicolas Sarkozy sent 8,000 Roma back to Romania and Bulgaria, and ordered police to destroy the illegal camps where they were living.

The European Union has called France's deportations disgraceful and illegal. But it's not the first time it has happened. In July, Denmark deported a group of Roma it said were criminals. In 2008, Italians razed Roma settlements outside of Naples. And officials in Milan have expelled 7,000 Roma and razed hundreds of camps--an effort that is ongoing.

"Let's be honest," says Karel Schwarzenberg, foreign minister of the Czech Republic. "In all our countries, the Roma are badly treated, especially by the police."

The French expulsions seem to have struck a particular nerve. To some, they are reminiscent of German deportations of Roma, Jews, and others the Nazis considered "undesirables" during World War II.

The comparison is especially fraught since the Roma were one of the groups targeted by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps in large numbers. Holocaust historians estimate that about 220,000 Roma were killed--about a quarter of all European Roma at the time.

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