I am originally from Bradford. The original Pakistani immigrants here (who mainly came from Mirpur and Bangladesh) came just to work. They got their heads down and they worked hard - often living 6 to a room, or squashed with 2 or 3 families in one house. Initially they were met with a mixture of hostility and racism; they were working too hard to worry about that and kept rigidly within their family groups, opened a couple of mosques so they could worship, opened some fantastic curry houses so they could eat familiar food, and kept largely to themselves. Other groups of immigrants went into different businesses.
Their children grew up facing even more entrenched hostility and racism, which I think caused them to largely ‘give up’ on integration, a feeling reinforced with a constant stream of related spouses brought from ‘home’ to marry the UK born children, which served to keep this generation firmly within their family-based social network. Numbers increased while at the same time many ‘white’ families moved out of Bradford as its jobs vanished due to the collapse of the wool industry. Parts of Bradford became a self-contained Urdu speaking enclave of Pakistan.
Now we have 3rd and 4th generation children. Few have chosen to keep entirely within their familiar support network. Some have responded to the hostility and constant feeling of ‘not belonging’ by embracing their Muslim Pakistani heritage with greater enthusiasm. But most identify more strongly now as British and have moved beyond the businesses and social networks of their parents. They are usually regarded as British rather than as Pakistani.
Bradford has had several waves of immigration. Some groups integrate faster than others. There is a feeling in Bradford that the Pakistanis have as a whole integrated less than other (significantly smaller) groups. When I was young, there were 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants from Germany and from Poland who were fully integrated, and some from the Caribbean who retained much of their cultural uniqueness, but were subject to less racism than the Pakistanis, probably due to shared language and religion. At the same time, 2nd gen Pakistani children were being ‘bussed’ out of central Bradford to surrounding ‘white’ primary schools. I remember these very unhappy, non-English speaking children being dropped off at my entirely ‘white’ school, to the shock of our unprepared teachers. This crass attempt at integration was soon stopped.
The biggest influx of Pakistani immigration happened just before the massive loss of wealth and prestige in Bradford when the wool industry collapsed, and many in Bradford have conflated the two events as cause/effect, which it certainly wasn’t, but the economic downturn led to much conflict and resentment over the decreasing number and quality of jobs, between the local population and the immigrant group.
When Britons think of Pakistanis, they are thinking mainly of immigrants rather than the country itself. Their views are coloured by where they live and whether their home city has large numbers of Pakistani immigrants, and their own personal encounters with this immigrant group.
Generally, Londoners are cosmopolitan and very positive towards Pakistanis.
Attitudes in smaller cities with larger Pakistani communities tend to be mixed, with a growing number of Britons feeling very positive towards Pakistanis (helped by marriages between communities). Others adopt a typically British attitude of ‘live and let live’, while still others are bitterly opposed to them. Many of the latter group in Bradford do not consider themselves to be racist - they are generally not in conflict with black Britons - but they continue to abhor the Pakistani community within the UK. A very small number have become opposed to all Muslims (partly due to the increased ‘presence’ of terrorism in the public consciousness, associated with Islam) and therefore to the Pakistani community - making no allowance for the large numbers of Pakistani Christian, Sikhs etc.
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