The Czech Republic last year eclipsed war-torn countries like Somalia, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka to become the seventh-biggest source of asylum seekers in Canada and at last count — with some 3,000 claims pending, up from a handful back in 2006 — had skyrocketed to second place, behind Mexico.

Canada’s immigration minister, Jason Kenney, argued that most refugee claimants from Mexico were in fact middle-class economic migrants, and also pointed to “bogus” refugee claims from the Czech Republic, most filed by members of the country’s Roma, or gypsy, community.

Ottawa slapped visas on both countries on July 15. Just a couple weeks later, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board publicly released the second of two reports from a March fact-finding mission to the Czech Republic, noting the Roma minority face “negative societal perceptions (including discrimination), inadequate housing, poor education, high unemployment, as well as far-right extremist activism.”

Much has been written about the immediate causes for the massive influx of Czech Roma asylum seekers to the Great White North — which began after Ottawa lifted the visa requirement in late 2007 — with the focus on the intensification of hate crimes in the Czech Republic over the past year, coinciding with unprecedented coordination between far-right political groups and skinheads.

Ales Horvath, a Roma businessman from the town of Pardubice who has been badly beaten twice by skinheads, says the constant — and rising — threat of violence pushed hundreds of Roma to pack their families off to Canada. “We are decent people. But we can’t go out into society like normal people,” Horvath told me. “Discrimination is so common here that people don’t even recognize it as discrimination. It has become normal. Society is pushing us into a corner more and more.”

In the international press — and to a large degree also the Czech press — debate has centered on the question of whether the Roma heading for Canada are legitimate refugees or simply economic migrants (or opportunists seeking to tap into a more generous social welfare system). But the role of capitalism is fanning the flames of extremism — by which I do not mean the catch-all explanation of the global financial crisis — has gone largely ignored.

The new ghettos

Widespread discrimination aside (and it’s no small thing), over the past 20 years, the Roma were literally pushed to the edge of Czech society. Along with the break-neck privatization (and corrupt practices) that gave birth to the term “the Wild East,” an unprecedented building boom in the country has lead to the creation of new Roma ghettos.

Before the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the Roma were far more integrated into Czech society, at least in terms of proximity, with white Czechs and Roma families living side by side, albeit not without tension. By the late 1990s, however, municipalities both large and small began in earnest to sell off properties, including the housing estates in which many Roma were living.

In 2006, prominent sociologist Ivan Gabal and a team of researchers released a study showing that nearly one-third of the Roma population lived in 250 new neighborhoods — usually run-down housing estates or dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of towns — that had come into being following the massive privatization of public housing in the 1990s.

Many of the Roma who found themselves in these ghettos, often in high-unemployment regions, had been evicted (along with “problematic inhabitants,” such as rent defaulters) from neighborhoods in Prague and other big cities undergoing free-market gentrification. Within these ghettos, Gabal’s researchers found that more than 95 percent of inhabitants were out of work.

Such ghettos make visible and easy targets for right-wing extremists. Such was the case with Janov, an isolated complex of neglected high rises in the Litvinov region, where neo-Nazis marching in step with members of fringe far-right Workers’ Party clashed with Roma, capturing headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The last half year has been marked by attempts to openly attack Roma communities, preceded by political gatherings, in particular of the Workers Party — that is new, new, new,”  said Gwendolyn Albert, who writes an annual country report on the Czech Republic for the European Network Against Racism, in a recent interview.

“Czech public officials, from mayors to ministers, have taken a page from the tactics of fringe neo-Nazi parties for political gain,” Albert says. “They are specifically targeting the issue of the proportionally large number of Roma citizens on welfare in this country as part of their populist political agendas.”

The Czech government is now considering a ban on the Workers Party and another extremist group, the National Party, which during the June elections for the European Parliament (incredibly) broadcast a video on Czech public television calling for “the final solution” to the Roma “question.” But for those trapped eking out a living in the new ghettos, the chance for a new life in Canada is another dream squashed.