Theodore Dalrymple, one of my favorite contemporary essayists, beautifully sums up the unique face of modern London:
London is now the most ethnically diverse city in the world — more so, according to United Nations reports, even than New York. And this is not just a matter of a sprinkling of a few people of every race and nation, or of the fructifying cultural effect of foreigners… Walk down certain streets in London and one encounters a Babel of languages. If a blind person had only the speech of passersby to help him get his bearings, he would be lost; though perhaps the very lack of a predominant language might give him a clue…
A third of London’s residents were born outside Britain, a higher percentage of newcomers than in any other city in the world except Miami, and the percentage continues to rise. Likewise, migration figures for the country as a whole — emigration and immigration — suggest that its population is undergoing swift replacement. Many of the newcomers are from Pakistan, India, and Africa; others are from Eastern Europe and China. If present trends continue, experts predict, in 20 years’ time, between a quarter and a third of the British population will have been born outside it, and at least a fifth of the native population will have emigrated.
What he says is literally true: When I walk down the streets here, I am as likely to hear a foreign language as I am English, and much of the English I hear is strongly accented. We have very little to compare with it in the US, outside of New York City.
Another thing that we don’t have in the US is the ethnically dominated neighborhoods of the UK and the Continent. (Oh, sure, I’ve been to several US Chinatowns and to Polish town in Chicago, but they don’t compare.) I remember riding in a chartered bus that was coming back into London from Stratford, and the driver took a route through a part of London that might as well been in Mumbai. It looked completely Indian, ablaze with brightly colored saris and foreign language billboards. I also remember the large, distinctly Muslim neighborhoods in Paris, filled with hundreds of men and boys — and no women.
Dalrymple, writing in City Journal, one of the more conservative rags in the list of zines I check in on from time to time, is conflicted about this phenomenon:
I admit to an ambivalence about the unprecedented diversity of British society. True, one feels a certain exhilaration seeing people of so many different origins going about their business in apparent peace… I am the child and grandchild of refugees who met with precisely the same kind of anti-immigration arguments current today, and it would be unseemly for me now to deny others the immense advantages that I have enjoyed.
The “multiculturalism” movement, originally promoted to protect the cultural identities of guest workers until they returned to their native lands, has largely failed, says Dalrymple.
But nor can one deny, if one is honest (and this is true of every Western European country), that many in the unprecedented influx of immigrants, often poorly educated, have little interest in, or appreciation of, the society to which they have come…
Aware of the [negative] polls on immigration, Brown’s Labour government has just taken some hesitant but sensible steps, putting aspiring British citizens on “probation” to show that they can speak English, pay taxes, and avoid jail before granting them citizenship.
Compared to the long-running emigration issues in Europe, Americans are relative newcomers to the multiculturalism debate. But, if what I read in the NYTimes is true, we’re already in the process of closing the door.
May 26, 2008 at 5:18 am
We have very little to compare to it anywhere else in the country – go to Birmingham and see how many foreigners we have there
And where is all the petty crime in the UK? Right there in London.