Daniel Finkelstein suggests that Immigration is won or lost in the playground [£]:
Integration is relatively easy to achieve. But it won’t take place by urging immigrants to integrate themselves. All over the world, immigrant communities integrate with broader societies simply by sending their children to school. In a single generation, by socialising with their peers, immigrant children become British children. As Judith Rich Harris explains in her book No Two Alike, the task of adolescents is to make their way in a world dominated by their peers, not their parents. So they quickly adjust to the norms of their peer group.
Which makes integration a matter of maths. If a school peer group is dominated by British children, the children of immigrants will integrate into it. But if the size of their own immigrant peer group is big enough, then, being only human, young people will socialise mainly with other members of that group.
Thus the difficulty with mass immigration is not, in fact, mass at all. Over time Britain can, and should, absorb many immigrants. The problem with mass immigration has been its speed. At its current, incredible, pace there is no chance for integration, either now or in the near future. And immigration without integration is bound to produce serious political tension, whether the sponsors of such a policy regard such tension as reasonable or not.
Slowing the pace of immigration is not about opposing immigrants. It’s about making a success of immigration.
Yes indeed. As this letter [£] from Professor Raj Bhopal argues, it works:
My late parents came from Punjab, India, and settled in the Gorbals of Glasgow in December 1955, and brought few assets except themselves and two children. My father had four years of schooling and rudimentary English. My mother had no schooling and no English. They were champions of hard work and education. My father’s small-scale trading ventures led to a thriving business that employed numerous local people for 40 years.
My mother raised her children in Scotland providing the country with an engineer, two doctors (including me), a businessman, a university academic, a teacher, a lawyer and another graduate professional. All her children, educated in Scotland, graduated from universities. The story is commonplace, rather than the exception, at least in Glasgow, and of course it echoes the tales of migrants internationally and across the centuries.
But there's one obvious corollary which Finkelstein doesn't mention. If these immigrants are supposed to integrate by mixing in the playground with children from the majority culture, then what about faith schools? I very much doubt that Professor Bhopal and his siblings attended a faith school. In faith schools immigrants - notably Muslim immigrants – are mixing solely with fellow immigrants. Everything they learn about British culture comes through the prism of a Muslim home environment and a Muslim school environment. And much of that, if we're to believe some recent TV programmes, is not, generally, positive. So there's no integration. So the corollary is, if we want to make a success of immigration, abolish faith schools. In fact, if you wanted to design a system whereby integration was made as difficult as possible, and separate communities were your desired outcome, you'd be hard pressed to come up with anything better than faith schools.
Perhaps Finkelstein doesn't make that obvious connection because, being a man with close connections to the Conservative Party, he wouldn't want to embarrass his friends in power. Though, of course, Labour is no better.
Mick Hartley 
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