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Comment by shrimpx | Hacker News Reader

Good news for Croatia.

To Romanians, the ongoing stonewalling is perceived as racism against Gypsies; fear that the under-documented Gypsies of Romania and Bulgaria will flood Western Europe, who already has had enough of the documented Gypsies migrating to their cities so far. And when, after years of poorly-founded claims that the Romanian external border was leaky, Austria brings up their brand new, never heard before reason "poor treatment of Austrian businesses", it's seen as making up random stuff, cynically.

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> poorly-founded claims that the Romanian external border was leaky

I'm not sure what you are talking about. There have been several incidents regarding smuggling across the Romanian border with Ukraine/Moldavia/Black Sea, plus endemic corruption (see the Recorder documentary).

I would not trust today's Romania to secure Europe's borders.

The Black Sea migration route is nowhere close to the Mediterranean routes. Like 200 incidents in the Black Sea vs 300k+ in the Mediterranean in 2022, with Italy, Greece and Spain being principal entry points.

Not talking about migration specifically. For example, there was an incident in 2019 when the Black Sea border surveillance system went down several times, and at the same time drug shipments were discovered on the sea shore.

Migrants routes may be used as a political justification but there have been a bunch of border incidents suggesting Romania does not in fact meet the criteria for Schengen.

Not sure what your point is, there is drug smuggling in pretty much any country in the world (except maybe North Korea), this can not be 100% stopped. By now it is common knowledge that western european ports are the drug hubs of the EU[1].

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/main-cocaine-ro...

Disclaimer: I’m romanian.

The whole border surveillance system went down in order for drug shipments (and who knows what else) to go through. The problem is obvious, you just need to acknowledge it. There's a difference between 1) insufficient border protection and 2) corrupt border security.

As far as corruption, Romania’s CPI is virtually identical to Hungary’s.

You won’t be able to make a good argument using statistics about corruption and migration. European politicians have given up on that, too. Now it’s subjective stuff like “they don’t treat our businesses well.”

> Others are also corrupt, what's the problem if we add one more corrupt country to the equation?

That's a bold strategy, let's see if pays off.

I'm in the south of England and there's been a marked uptick in "Romanian" beggers and pick pockets over the last decade. [disclaimer: I don't know if they're actually Romanian]

There's also a bunch of lovely people. One of the companies I worked with had a remote office in Romania, and onshored a fair amount of staff, and they were perfectly european culturally.

The counter is obviously there's nothing wrong with Romanians ethnically, but there has been downsides of denying the negative consequences of immigration, which had helped fuel our absolute farce of removing from the union.

With that said, from the little knowledge I have on the issues, many of these issues are the UK shooting itself in the foot, but my point is these are not black and white issues, but rather complex issues that are better fixed for an increasingly stable Europe.

If you don't know whether they are Romanian, why do you say they are?

A couple of reasons.

  - timing of the influx
  - appearance
  - my wife is Ukrainian and see believes them to be Romanian.  She likely has better insight than I.
  - She also talks to them sometimes.

On that note, most recent case of pick pockets I came across were actually speaking Ukrainian in Norwich.

[Leaving aside the implication that "Romanian" has become a sort of synonym for beggar or pick-pocket:]

The thing is, Romanians are Europeans. They're all culturally European. It's just that some (mostly Western) Europeans dislike the grimier aspects of European culture and have redefined European-ness to exclude some European people.

If I see a hobo from Alabama begging downtown, I'm not going to be like "this guy is not 'culturally American,' we should restrict Alabama's travel to the rest of the US." I see it as American culture, and we should fix it by improving quality of life throughout the federation.

The "unified Europe" project is hilariously wrapped up in mindfuck games of who to exclude.

You're right, European wasn't the right word, it was more a rich / poor thing.

That's said, comparison to the US doesn't make sense, since it was only back in 2008 when Romania was added to the bloc.

We're mostly on the same page, I just assume it's a process rather than pulling the plaster off.

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