Asians becoming more isolated as urban ghettoes grow

I'm posting both the Grauniad and Torygraph angles on this one just to be safe.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/01/nimm01.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/09/01/ixportal.html

Asian enclaves in British cities are growing in both their size and isolation and are likely to expand even more as a result of further immigration, according to a study presented yesterday.

The enclaves, in cities such as Bradford, Leicester and Oldham, now compare in scale with some of the African-American enclaves in places such as New York, Chicago and Miami, geographers were told at their annual conference in London.

One of the major findings was that there was a greater mixing by most ethnic groups with the native "host" community between the censuses of 1991 and 2001.

But the growth of Asian enclaves, for example Bengalis living in East London, went starkly against that trend. Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups in major cities were more isolated than a decade ago.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1560368,00.html

Asian communities living in several UK cities face social isolation as severe as that experienced in the black ghettoes of divided American cities like Miami and Chicago, research has found.
Mike Poulsen, a lecturer in geography at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, analysed UK census data from 1991 and 2001. He found that the number of people from the Pakistani community who lived in segregated communities in Bradford and Oldham had trebled during the decade. The numbers of people within the Indian community in Leicester living in such enclaves rose by a third.

The community in each city could be classed as living in a ghetto, Dr Poulsen told the annual meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London.

He said: "It's alarming that UK cities are rising up the world rankings in terms of segregation. The idea was that people would assimilate. The danger is that the assimilation process is so slow that for many it is just not possible."

Segregation, misery, social immobility. Tony Blair is jerking off.

Immigrants are second class citizens from the getgo. We have not the
same legal rights as UK citizens, and even if, after many years, we gain
british citizenship, it is to be a second class partial citizensship,
as blair would have it. So what are we to do?

The problem seems that persons are trying to create a nationalist
british identity, from which the super-class british citizens can have
better rights and better pay. And the immigratn class ones can feel
left out and loathed for eroding "our way of life.".. and further and
further, there is little point in attempting to cross the divide.

Better to hang out with other second class citizens where we share
equality. Here in scotland, us foreigners share this lower class
along with english immigrants, and doesn't it poke a hole in the
irony of importing american nationalism to revive the old tory
ethnocentrism that once drove the british to be the greatest war
crimes nation of a century past. Now that the baton has been handed
over to the US, you'd think britain would be the wiser, but not with
the labour hacks in office, no sirreee..

Thought I might as well post this here as this topic seems to be in the news a lot at present.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1576659,00.html

Ghettoisation of ethnic minorities in Leicester and Bradford has reached levels almost equivalent to that in Chicago and Miami, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality said last night.
Delivering his heavily trailed speech on segregation last night in Manchester, Trevor Phillips said that for people of Pakistani origin, the two cities were fast becoming ghetto communities. In Leicester, 13% lived in ethnically concentrated areas, compared with 10.8% in 1991. The percentage in Bradford had trebled from 4.3% in 1991 to 13.3% now.

"Residentially, some districts are on their way to becoming fully-fledged ghettoes - black holes into which no one goes without fear and trepidation and from which no one ever escapes undamaged ... We are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream," said Mr Phillips. He said that in the next 10 years, Birmingham and Leicester would become Britain's first "majority-minority" cities, where most citizens were not white. He warned that community leaders would have to work to "arrest the trend towards separate and competing ethnic fiefdoms within their city walls".

In the speech, titled After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation, given to the Manchester Council for Community Relations, he highlighted how Britain's younger generation were less integrated than their parents. Last year, a CRE survey found that 94% of white Britons said that all or most of their friends were white. A survey found that this has increased to 95%. More than half of those asked, 55%, could not name a single non-white friend.

with a helping hand from one Tony Blair.

I have to salute Trevor Phillips for his courage on this issue although I expect it helps that he is black. Any white commentator who raised this subject would probably end up getting tarred as a racist. It is strange until recently so few people on the left have recognised that, for all their good intentions, some multicultural initiatives have engendered the development of an insidious form of apartheid in the UK .As a consequence immigrant groups are becoming increasingly geographically, socially and economically isolated not only from the host community but from each other. This situation is reinforced by the poor job opportunities available for many individuals within these areas. With high rates of unemployment it is not surprising that Pakistanis in Bradford or Bengalis in the East End cling to their families and communities for support. It is no more than a rational choice. Of course there are plenty of individuals both in the host society and immigrant groups are only too happy with this situation because it helps to reinforce existing power structures. I suppose one of the most depressing programs I have seen on TV in the past few years was Darcus Howe's Channel 4 documentary on hostile attitudes within the Asian community to people from Africa and the Caribbean. In particular it highlighted the rarity of interracial marriages between these groups. By comparison whites were far more likely to enter into relationships with blacks.

http://channel4.com/history/microsites/B/blackhistorymap/articles_08.html

In many ways this is the key issue because misgenation is probably the quickest and most effective way to break down barriers. This is the reason why racists of all creeds and colours fear it so much.