Whether it’s Trojan horses in Birmingham schools or Tory MPs defecting to Ukip, immigration dominates political discourse. Since 1997, the number of people moving to Britain has soared, transforming its towns and cities. But while policymakers talk about the economic benefits of immigration, many voters remain unconvinced. This summer, a poll carried out by The Economist/Ipsos suggested that race and immigration had overtaken the economy to become the primary concern of British voters.
Immigration and its social impact was the subject of a recent Guardian roundtable, in association with the British Academy. The discussion brought together politicians, leading academics and policy experts to debate the effect Britain’s changing ethnic diversity is having on national identity and cohesion.
Immigration isn’t a new phenomenon, the panel heard, but the scale and variety of countries from which people are moving is greater than ever. Parveen Akhtar, lecturer in sociology at the University of Bradford, said that Britain’s ethnic makeup no longer showed “diversity”: instead, it is characterised by “super diversity”.
“Post-1945 you had large waves of immigration from fewer places in the world, largely from the former colonies,” said Akhtar. “Now, since the 1980s, you’ve got smaller waves of immigration from a wider range of places.”
The sheer numbers of people moving to the UK is also striking, added David Goodhart, chair of thinktank Demos’ advisory group. “We’ve had minority pockets in big cities for years – Jewish, Irish, and Bangladeshis in cities such as Cardiff, Liverpool and so on.” But since then, immigration has increased vastly. “In the early 1990s the ethnic minority populations accounted for 6-7% of residents in England and Wales,” he said. That figure is now 14%, according to the 2011 Census.
How well this eclectic mix of communities integrate can have a profound impact on both domestic and foreign policy, said professor Chris Hill, Sir Patrick Sheehy professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge.
“Anyone who has been thinking about Isil and Syria won’t need convincing that there’s a link between international politics and what goes on at home.” It is important that UK residents have a “shared destiny”, he added.
The pace at which immigration occurs is crucial, said Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Referring to research he carried out in collaboration with Demos, he described how the white British population is more likely to resist immigration when it happens very quickly. “What’s driving the salience of the immigration issue, is not just distrust in Westminster – although that is in the mix – and it’s not just the economic crisis or economic structure; it’s down to demographic change moving beyond the capacity of the ethnic majority to adjust to those changes.”
This suggestion rung true for Roger Evans, member of the London Assembly for Havering and Redbridge. He explained that many of his constituents resented the speed at which immigration had occurred and how quickly this had transformed their local area. Havering, which is on the fringes of Essex, is one of only three London boroughs with Ukip councillors, Evans added.
Immigration affects everyone
Although Kaufmann’s research looked specifically at the experience of the white British majority population, they’re not the only section of society that can feel uncomfortable about immigration. Settled ethnic minorities are also often concerned by the arrival of newcomers, said Emma Stone, director of policy and research at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a development and social research charity. “We previously did work in Moss Side, Manchester, where we had seen a coming together of the white and settled black African-Caribbean communities against the newly arriving Somalis. These dynamics play out in really complicated ways.”
In Conservative MP Dominic Grieve’s constituency of Beaconsfield, a row emerged after the Department for Education granted permission for a free school for Sikhs to open in a local village. The faith school is designed to serve more traditional Sikh communities who would be bussed in from outside areas such as Slough and west London, Grieve explained. Although there is a Sikh community in Beaconsfield, they – much like the area’s white majority population – are mostly opposed to the school, he said.
“The local Sikh community had made choices about how they were going to lead their lives. This did not include sending their children to a Sikh faith-based school.”
Such examples of community division show that no minority group is homogenous, said Gabriella Elgenius, associate professor at the University of Gothenburg and research associate at the University of Oxford. “The Beaconsfield Sikh faith school is very interesting because it shows that when we speak about ethnic communities we are really talking plural – Sikhs aren’t just one community, there are lots of divisions, competing narratives and so on.”
On top of the diversity within minority groups, many communities have more than one “identity”, added Jocelyn Wyburd, chair of the University Council of Modern Languages: “But what may be threatening to some groups is having that single identity, yet being surrounded by all this pluralism.”
Wyburd drew a parallel with languages, stating that many ethnic minority groups speak two or more languages. This contrasts with the white British majority’s monolingualism, she said. Although the coalition government has introduced languages to the curriculum at primary level, take-up in schools is still low.
Encouraging English mother-tongue speakers to learn another language would benefit students academically and, crucially, help them to understand their fellow residents’ cultures, argued Wyburn. “We’ve got high-achieving students who have English as an additional language, often out-achieving mother-tongue English speakers. One, and only one, of the reasons is the increased cognitive benefits of bilingualism.
“If we can harness the multilingualism in our presence and have that affect everybody – not just say to immigrants you have to learn English because you’re in this country, but actually we have to learn other languages as well – that could be massively beneficial in schools and benefit cross-cultural communication.”
Wyburd’s suggestion was met with surprise from Goodhart. “The idea that you have to learn a foreign language to make yourself understood in your own country will strike most people as quite bizarre,” he said.
Many would be more inclined to sympathise with Ukip leader Nigel Farage’s recent comment that he felt uncomfortable when surrounded by people speaking foreign languages on the bus, he said.
“What we really need is success stories that we can point to,” Goodhart told the panel. “We want specific places that we can point to where there is unselfconscious mixing between white and ethnic minority groups.”
Economic benefits
While Grieve pointed out that the arrival of immigrants to the Thames valley had provided an injection of enterprise to the region, David Kirkby, a researcher for the conservative thinktank Bright Blue, said such economic arguments will not win over voters. “If, as many contributors have said, people’s concerns around immigration centre upon pace of change or loss of familiar reference points, you can see how emphasising the way in which immigrants have contributed to growth does not feed into the worries that people have.”
Everyday factors such as whether or not immigrants go to the pub, or whether they are visible in the community, are important to the white British majority population, Kirkby argued.
According to Kaufmann, assimilation is taking place. He explained that the children of European immigrants tend to identify themselves as white British, and that the mixed-race population is increasing faster than the ethnic minority population. “These stories haven’t been told too much, but this does suggest that there is a quite robust process of assimilation into the ethnic majority.”
Kaufmann’s research also indicated that local resentment towards immigration fades after 10 years, and that areas with pre-existing diversity tend to be more tolerant towards immigration.
But while attitudes at a local level may change, the question of whether these match up with national political debates is up for discussion.
As local areas undergo their own experiences of immigration and many move from diversity to so-called “super diversity”, politics itself is changing. “It’s becoming more difficult to do the old-style identity politics where you found a particular group and did what they wanted,” said Evans. “We now have immigration from everywhere in the world.”
This discussion took place at the Conservative Party conference.
At the table
Anne Perkins (Chair), journalist, the Guardian
Parveen Akhtar, lecturer in sociology, school of social and international studies, Bradford University
Ann Carlisle, executive director, Chartered Institute of Linguists
Gabriella Elgenius, associate professor, department of sociology and work science, University of Gothenburg
Roger Evans AM, chairman, London Assembly
David Goodhart, chair, Demos advisory group
Dominic Grieve QC, Conservative MP for Beaconsfield
Professor Chris Hill FBA, Sir Patrick Sheehy professor of international relations, University of Cambridge
Emma Stone, director of policy and research, Joseph Rowntree Foundation
David Kirkby, researcher, Bright Blue
Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics, Birkbeck College
Andrew Wilson, senior lecturer in criminology, Nottingham Trent University
Jocelyn Wyburd, chair, University Council of Modern Languages
Read more from the party conferences discussions:
Credits
This content has been sponsored by the British Academy (whose brand it displays). All content is editorially independent. Contact David Mills (david.mills@theguardian.com). For information on roundtables visit: theguardian.com/sponsored-content
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