Has immigration enriched the UK through greater cultural and culinary diversity?

[HonestFox]

When it has bought so many different cultures and food into the U.K. so why is there so much hatred towards it?

One weekend I came home from college. There's this recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese, my mother said. Yes, there have been parts of Britain that had quite concentrated areas of Italian immigrants. I know one. Hardest working person I ever came across. I have pots of affection and respect for her.

I don't mind the supermarkets having all manner of 'foreign' foods on offer. I just get a bit narked if they don't have room on the shelves for ground rice."Never mind the b......... nachos" I shout in Sainsbury's, "Where's the ground rice?"

Other countries seem to be able to monitor visas and deport but not the UK!

The people who staff my local hospital and take care of us when we are sick….The teachers in my kid’s school…
The wonderful restaurant owners of many different backgrounds providing an international menu for our community, The people staffing our public transport system..My cleaner…. My Plumber…. My decorator….My gardener….The lady who cared for my Dad before he died.. My Doctor… My dentist… My PT…..kids from over 50 different nationalities in my kids’ school being their friends and welcoming them warmly into their homes…My best friends…my neighbours …. The beautiful kind nanny who cared for my son when I first returned to work…. Mybson’s maths tutor…..ALL IMMIGRANTS OR CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS. Yes of course they have enriched our world. Thank god we live in our beautiful multicultural and tolerant capitol city 💖

I’m sorry for those of you with so much hate in your hearts. I truly am.

You gave a perfectly valid assumption the first time (about community participation), but then assumed there’s racist intent in the latter part?

For no reason?

This just sums up the whole debate, really.

Someone is telling you their area has changed completely, presumably negatively, and the response is that you must be hateful of other ethnicities. Interesting also people always jump to race and not culture.

You don’t even know that PP is white, fgs. She could be black, Asian, mixed race and still have the exact same feelings. Not all non-white people are immigrants, some of us were born here too.

Go on YouTube, find a video of your town from 30 to 50 years ago and watch it.

Then walk down your high street.

You'll quickly realise how much it has changed - and mostly for the worse.

It's about numbers, the economy, integration, community and values.

Yes the cool people on here try to portray anyone who notices this as racist - but they've noticed it as well.

Again I'm looking at sustained and chronic under funding of the arts and culture sector for decades... erosion of the common culture comes from people not being able to access arts and culture on a general population level. Not other people entering the space. "I know who I am from knowing what I am not" is a psychological concept around identity. Identity is actually strengthened through diversity. I do heritage work and a big part of the issue now is access to free heritage programmes due to long term cuts. Do you know who is super keen to sign up to programmes to learn about local culture and heritage so they can be respectful of it though? All of the asylum seekers and immigrants I work with. They're happy to champion celebration of culture all day long. Getting local people to engage is much harder.

Oh, for goodness’ sake. None of that is an argument in favour of immigration. You’re just listing jobs which are done by immigrants. Fifty years ago those jobs were done by native people. Was that an argument against immigration then?

What makes you think this? There is some evidence that children of muslim immigrants , for example, are more radical in their views than their parents.

Immigration is like seasoning in a recipe. A little enhances, but too much overwhelms. The problem in our country is the speed of demographic change, with no thought given as to where the incomers will live, the need for more infrastructure, doctors’s surgeries etc. There is also the cost of translation services. We are told we need young workers to pay for pensions - yet they will grow old in their turn, so it’s a Ponzi scheme. And the thing I most object to is the change in our culture - I don’t recognise the town centre any more, filled as it is with Turkish barbers, nail bars and foreign supermarkets selling halal food. There are parts of London and elsewhere that are like going to a foreign country.

And this is usually as a direct response to experience of social exclusion and racism/xenophobia... as well as watching government involvement in the exploitation of certain countries of origin.

Again this is government level issues. For the number of houses built there is supposed to be a certain level of infrastructure and green spaces for play. However big building companies work around this by buying and building in sections so they need to do less consideration for the infrastructure. Local authorities are now much more informed on this but private companies are doing all they can to get around it and they needs to be more robust caps on this at government level around planning. Again this is nothing to do with newcomers. We have massive issues in certain areas where I live due to this. Those areas are vastly predominantly white in demographic.

Those are possible explanations. Others exist. Do you think Christian or athiest immigrants would be treated more "inclusively" in these Muslim countries of origin?

On a brighter note, the culinary diversity is amazing and ever-expanding. There's a fantastic cafe in East London that's been in the same Italian family for 125 years. Go to Germany to see what our food culture would be like without immigration. Meat and potatoes, the occasional sausage.

Wow. Really? You seem nice.

We've had two massive bulges of people.

• The first was when the EU opened up and Blair didn't put any controls on people coming over, whereas the other, richer areas of the EU did. So we had thousands more. Coincidentially, house prices started to shoot up.
• The second was Johnson's Social Care visa, allowing people to move here with their families. I get why he did that - social care is poorly paid and in a crisis - but it caused a massive jump in numbers and the majority of carers will never pay in enough to be net contributors. Which is a problem because...
• ...we don't have enough funds to cover the rising welfare bill. Including pension, long-term sickness and universal credit. We're borrowing to stand still. Part of the problem is long-term sick is growing because of our structural problems with unemployment - why would a 19-year-old from a depressed area with no jobs and no qualifications languish on universal credit when they can apply for (relatively) better terms of ESA and Attendance Allowance on the grounds of their mental health? Please note: I don't think they are playing ther system: many will be genuinely depressed - but there's no real route out. We don't invest enough in post-16 college education and there's not enough apprenticeships. Even casual shop work and bartending has gone down. At the other end of the scale, we have knackered 55-year-olds in deprived areas waiting for the NHS to fix them. Sometimes there is no operation or pill that can give them their health back. But early retirement is not an option, either. Hence: rising ESA numbers.

It's a massive, structural problem and the reason why we have a productivity puzzle here in the UK: our politicians privatised all the assets, removed anything state-funded on the basis that "market forces" will take care of it and fudged the figures on the rest.

We need to accept some things need long-term planning and state intervention. Adult education, water, ultilities and housing. Let's ring-fence the basics so we don't have kids sick from pollution after swimming in the sea.

What is really meant by culture or cultural enrichment?

I think there is or certainly has been a tendency for schools and other public services to engage in cultural window-dressing e.g. if it’s ‘diverse’ and the clothes or art are colourful, then it must be intrinsically good. I agree that the whole community should be represented in what a school does but these efforts can end up feeling somewhat superficial and perhaps not very representative either as school communities develop and change over time. For example is Diwali celebrated more in schools than eastern european, Traveller or Roma festivals?

I once worked for a headteacher who took a very hard line on racial representation. Their rule was that only black or brown skinned children could be chosen for main parts in school plays or assemblies. They would directly overrule teachers if they felt that the casting wasn’t right. If you were blonde and blue eyed you basically had zero chance of ever being Mary! It was basically a direct inversion of what might have been the case in the bad old days of racial discrimination. Perhaps it was an attempt to right previous wrongs, but I am not sure it was any better really…It was also somewhat insulting to the teachers to imply that racial discrimination would ever have been a possibility.

It is a very complex topic and I don’t think we have got it right yet.

I think humans are a lot more like other primates than we like to think. Far too many people want to live in their little troop with familiar faces and attack anyone who isn't a member of their troop.

People can dress it up however makes them feel better but at the end of the day, in my opinion, it boils down to 3 elements.
1 - this is my territory and if you come in it, I'll rip your face off and eat it.
2 - these are my resources and I don't want to share them with you and if you try to take my resources i will rip your face off and eat it.
3 - you aren't exactly like me, that is a threat to me and so I will take time to understand you, talk with you and work together to improve our... just kidding, I will rip your face off and eat it.

Heard it on Radio 4 one Saturday morning, years ago.

I'd say yes, immigration had enriched society, burn culturally and economically. It's well understood and proven that immigrants bring in more than they take away, and often are crucial to the societal infrastructure that people blame them for clogging up, such as health services.

Life is change as far as I'm concerned, and immigration is only going to grow, especially as climate change forces people from the global south northwards. I think the best move is to plan to make the most of it rather than trying to stop all of it.

Yes where I live the whole demographic has changed and it is quite depressing

i understand why people wanted to move from Southall in the 70s

I didn’t speak about my area at all. But it doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to understand that a large influx of people from other cultures is going to have a drastic effect on the local culture and community. Particularly when they are concentrated in the poorest communities rather than spread out. And yes, a big factor in that will be Brits becoming a minority (or simply feeling like they are a minority) in their home. It’s not wrong to acknowledge that and it’s a perfectly reasonable concern. I don’t think anyone would criticise other ethnicities who wish to retain their cultural identity in their home, and I won’t pretend that it’s not important for us, too.
Change in demographics = change in culture.

As I said, it’s a case of the poorest and least privileged people in our society being expected to put up and shut up.
It’s loss of cultural identity and familiarity on one end, and more affluent people who aren’t affected, punching down on the other end. And then everyone wonders where the anger’s coming from as if it’s materialised out of thin air.

Small numbers did. What we have now, no.

I think we have reached the point where we’re no longer being ‘enriched.’ I’m sure world foods would have made their way here anyway. Instead, I feel we’re being poisoned by having cultures which do not fit well with our own way of life forced upon us. We’re not asking new arrivals to become one of us, or even to obey our laws and so these communities are expecting to live & behave as they previously did. And it seems we’re increasingly being expected to fit in, instead, forced to respect cultures which don’t respect us, that treat women like property, that want to terminate pregnancy just because the baby is a girl. I could go on, but you all know it.

As many others have said, asylum seekers are being housed in deprived areas of deprived towns & cities, my north-eastern home town included. These post-industrial towns have had little to no investment for decades & decades; fewer schools, they’re lucky if they are the location of the whole area’s single, centralised hospital, fewer GP surgeries, terrible rail services and the roads aren’t much better. And no good jobs. As @Flyffin said, those in fashionable, expensive, wealthy, leafy areas, who think a £60K salary is rubbish, may never have experienced this. So being patronised by them just isn’t on.

We can’t adequately and fairly cope with the population that is here right now. For the first time in my life, I really can’t see how we can improve our economic state, to help us feel more confident about our own personal financial situations. It’s downright depressing, as well as scary, and we’ll sink if we can’t control the rise in our population as one of the steps. For the foreseeable future at least.

I’m sure I’ll be called a racist but, you know what, I don’t agree and, most importantly, nor do I care. The word has lost all meaning over the last few years by being thrown around to stop reasonable debate.

Yes some of these people I have listed are doing jobs in my community.
Useful jobs. Caring jobs. Helping society. White people are all at liberty to apply for the exact same jobs you know.

The point is, immigrants and their kids from all over the world fill my community and I like that 😊

You’re not going to like this either, but people with issues about there being too many foreigners are racist. Get over it. Do better.

Do tell me where exactly the ghettos are in Leicester?