Ethnic diversity in London and other British cities

[Crawford]

Also, while there's no doubt Indians concentrate in McMansiony sprawl, their concentrated presence has revitalized some older suburban commercials districts. In Central NJ, with the biggest Indian concentration in the U.S., there are some aging cores that were revitalized by the Indian influx:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5737...7i16384!8i8192

But most of the U.S. Indian retail presence is in suburban strip malls and the like.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

^When I visited France I sensed that immigrants were being kept on the edges of the towns and cities as much as they were sticking together by their own accord.

In the United States you observe new immigrant groups settling in one area of town out of convenience, but they aren't being sent to those areas on purpose. There is in fact no legal mechanism by which local governments could make that happen.

Neither is there over here...

You don't seriously think the French state would be officially racist or implement any official segregation, do you?

Over here, immigrants often come from impoverished countries where they got no education, then when they get to France, they end up in gloomy social-housing suburbs simply because they can't afford anything better.
There is no racist policy behind this. It's just the local market that drives poor people away from city centers.

Besides, the French state actually remains quite generous in subsidizing people in financial difficulties, in spite of the international competition and pressure.
The social system is well known to be extremely expensive to taxpayers here, like only Denmark would compare in that matter in the democratic world.

Pardon me, but your feelings as a tourist were just wrong. You'd need to spend a couple of years in the country and speak French to actually grasp what the local system is made of, what it takes, what its flaws and advantages can be and so on.
You do realize that you can't understand the whole thing properly just by a quick visit as a tourist, don't you?

[Yuri]

My impression is “non-ethnic French” (in quotes because I’m aware ethnicity in France is a completely different concept compared to the rest of Europe) people in France looks “more French” than the immigrants in London as latter got much more immigrants on the past two decades. France, on the other hand, has a very strong immigration tradition going back two centuries ago.

[Docere]

This is true, France had net immigration a century ago, in Britain there was net emigration.

[Docere]

Britain had net emigration until the 1980s:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulat...euk/2016-12-01

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

"Ancestry" isn't really a concept in Britain the same way it is in the US, Canada and Australia.

(The same mobility occurred in US Catholics, but they kept their hyphenated status, that is, they called themselves Irish-American, Italian-American, or Polish-American. In England, they became Englishmen or Englishwomen with an Irish name.
Source: Peter Dunnigan and Lewis Gann, The Rebirth of the West

Is there an explanation for this phenomenon, if it's as widespread as it seems? It is specific to Irish, for European immigrants, for immigrants of a certain time period (e.g. 19th century or 20th) or is it the case for others?

It doesn't neatly cleave along the conventional narrative of US as melting pot or US as strongly assimilationist vs. others, nor does it fit the narrative of old world "ethnonational" vs. new world "civic national" identity.

The "I'm X generations removed from "old country" but still call myself "ethnic" group" seems strongly seen as American (e.g. someone in Wisconsin who identities as German who's never been to Germany) but a wider cross-national comparison doesn't seem to suggest it's limited in this way.

Indeed, it's not merely an Old World/New World (in the geographical sense, if not newness of the nation) thing.

Because there are both new world and old world "descendants of immigrant" folks who either strongly do the "retain identity" or "hyphenate identity" thing alike (e.g. Chinese or Malay or Indian Singaporean, just like Polish American or Lebanese Australian) but there are also new world and old world "descendants of immigrants" who just don't do so as much (e.g. French folks of old school 19th century or 20th century European descent, or even more recent immigrants who identify as "just French" or Brazilians who identify as "just Brazilian" even if they have various ancestries).

Any rhyme or reason to it? I can't seem to parse out what determines whether a nation will result in a "hyphenated/ancestry focus" or not aside from conventional narratives that New Worlders/newer nations are going to acknowledge more recent heritage than older countries and that newer waves of immigrants are going to hyphenate then lose it as their kids lose touch with the ancestral land. But that's too simplistic, right?

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Regarding the US, I've never been there, but I guess there is this feeling of everybody feeling home and no one caring much about what other people are up to. That's one of my favorite things here in São Paulo and also in London. Paris is definitely not like that.

That's not what Simon Kuper (journalist at the Financial Times, of Dutch-South African-British origin) thinks. He's lived in Paris since the 2000s, and wrote exactly about that in the FT yesterday:

Why the world can benefit from contact theory

A fear of the ‘other’ can usually be cured by actual contact with them

https://www.ft.com/content/514617c5-...f-0bb99535f80f

I see this with my children: whereas I was raised in an almost entirely white small town, they have grown up in multiracial Paris, go to school with kids of different ethnicities and take the mix for granted. Contact theory is how they live.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

^When I visited France I sensed that immigrants were being kept on the edges of the towns and cities as much as they were sticking together by their own accord.

In the United States you observe new immigrant groups settling in one area of town out of convenience, but they aren't being sent to those areas on purpose. There is in fact no legal mechanism by which local governments could make that happen.

There is no legal mechanism by which local governments in France can make that happen either. In fact immigrants are all across Greater Paris, including the city of Paris proper. Of course, since many immigrants are white and you're not a native French speaker I presume, you wouldn't notice them. To you they probably looked like "French people".