First of all I'm not trying to paint all gypsies with the same brush. I actually know a couple that are very educated, very honest and very hard-working human beings. But within all the "Roma" minorities, there are sub-groups and not all of them are created equal.
In general in Romania there are many gypsies that are definitely not marginalized and impoverished.
Some of their culture is also part of ours (e.g. many people like their music), their children go to the same schools as Romanians, some of their words became a part of our language, interracial marriages are not at all uncommon (up to the point that for some people their origin is not at all visible) and they also receive lots of subsidies from the government ... they definitely are NOT marginalized. If anything, some sub-groups of this minority are marginalizing themselves.
Also, there are many gypsies that are filthy rich. Come down here sometimes and I'll show you entire villages of villas (i.e. big and luxurious country residences) that are inhabited by gypsies. Those villas come paired with luxury cars too. And some of them still steal, still beg for money on our streets or in other countries, some of them still live in tents in their own backyard.
I know quite a few travellers, roma and irish gypsies and the one thing I do know is all three groups are tight and fairly insular, especially from each other. And like any tight groups they are very good at reflecting the attitudes they percieve to be directed towards them.
For the record, I am not from any of these groups and have had relatively few problems with them, when compared to other groups I have interacted with. Drunk anglo-saxon football fans, for instance.
> ...including the Roma minority which are highly nomadic by tradition and very visible in the west because they beg and steal aggressively and live in slums in very primitive conditions.
And that makes me wonder why the first two searches for "italians are" are:
-italians are jews
-italians are not white
for the first search, according to a couple of articles i've found, there were in 2003 less than 50k jews in italy (of 60mil of inhabitants), so a very small part
for the second one, i dont know how to interpret it, maybe black people?
And the phenomenon is not limited to nationality: the first suggestion i saw once for "how do i" is "how do i google something".
We must all remember that not only the rest of the world have stereotypes, they are also on average dumb (and that we are rest of the world to most people).