Impact of the Pandemic on the Eastern European Roma Population in Spain

Abstract

This work focuses on the analysis of the incidence of Covid-19 in the Roma population of Eastern Europe residing in Spain. This article intends to examine the multidimensional impacts that the pandemic has caused in the different areas:  education, employment, housing or fundamental rights. For this purpose, a thematic review was carried out on recent studies of the consequences of the pandemic on the Roma ethnic minority in the various countries of Europe, and Spain in particular. The decline in the precarious living conditions of this population has reached alarming levels in the various European countries during the pandemic, increasing levels of food insecurity and revealing new processes of discrimination and stigmatization towards this group in all countries of Europe. In this work, the Covid-19 pandemic has been considered a new global factor that makes up a new scenario, influencing pre-existing exclusion dynamics. These always seem to affect the same population sectors, the most vulnerable, which occupy a more marginal position in the social stratification that emerges from global dynamics. Once again we witness human rights abuses against Roma in the EU context closely linked to the process of ethnicization of the pandemic.