To not want to be the minority where I live?

[Charlottehines]

It really saddens me that in parks and soft plays with my children, that I am in the minority and my children can't play with other children there as they all play together and obviously can't speak English.
I'm in no way racist, my husband is of mixed origin but I do find it incredibly sad that my children are growing up the minority especially when these other groups make no effort to integrate with other mums or the children.
Am I completely unreasonable to feel sad about this?

Re. the Putnam study, as someone (OhMyGerd?) said above, you can't just take a diversity study done in the US and apply the results to the UK.

The history of racism in the US is very specific - it has to do with slavery and the fact that racial segregation in the American South was ubiquitous and LEGAL merely a generation ago.

You have to look at how diversity operates within a particular cultural context. There are no one-size-fits-all conclusions.

I also noticed that leftwing popped out of nowhere to comment on this thread... nice.

That is hardly compelling evidence that South Asian and African migrants can be assimilated in the UK, let alone evidence that we will be better off socially prior to mass immigration.

Which bit of mass immigration would that be, from roughly about the year 0 (CE)
Shall we talk Vikings? Or the Romans, who did bring Africans with them, as did Catherine of Aragon and of course there was a thriving slave trade.

YouTheCat, my initial response was on a subject related to parenting, specifically, is it reasonable to want your child to go to a majority English speaking school. In that context, I mentioned that diversity in general wasnt particularly desirable, as a response to all the previous comments about how he OP either shouldnt care about diversity or actively appreciate it, and she was racist.

In so far as my posts have strayed from the OP, it is due to people finding that particular claim objectionable and focussing on those remarks, or due to me responding to personal attacks.

Well just back from the park with my friends. Left, right and centre to us were young folk and families of all races and speaking different languages, some Asian and some European. The sun was shining, people were using the great facilities and it was lovely - everyone was having fun and enjoying the glorious weather.

Strange who two folk can see the same situation but see it differently and feel differently about it.

No. Assimilation would be losing your own sense of distinct culture and becoming one, homogenous mass.

This is not diversity.

Diversity is why American goes green for St. Patrick although when Irish migrants first arrived in large waves it caused the exact same kind of reaction as we see in Britain in response to central Europeans migrating.

Diversity is communities coming together to celebrate St Patricks whether or not they are Irish, or joining a community's Eid celebrations whether or not they are Muslim.

If you want the evidence why don't you go read it? The man has written dozens of articles, 14 books, given multiple lectures and interviews. For the 2007 study he collected data from a national survey of over 30,000 people which was then analysed. He didn't simply look for correlations between diversity and ethnic diversity but included analysis against long term variables. The information is not difficult to find. Nor is the fact he said himself that when he first began to anlayse the data he found it personally upsetting that it showed that diversity was causing problems. But he didn't ignore it, suppress it or manipulate it even though it contradicted his personal belief. The data was collected in 2004 and analsysed over the next year or so. The report was published in 2007 - not a great delay by research standards when it can take 9-12 months post-acceptance for an article to appear in print.

Multiculturalism and diversity do bring short term problems. To pretend they do not is to ignore the real governmental steps that can be taken to help aid integration and stop problems becoming embedded. They also bring real long term benefits. All the evidence shows for example that the UK has had a net benefit from central European migration. The difficulty is the net benefit (taxes paid etc) tend to go to the national government whilst the costs (EAL in schools, support for recent migrants, translation services etc) tend to come out of the budgets of local government. That however is the fault of the system, not the migrant.

How can integrating not be a good thing? People fear (and thus strike out in racist statements etc) the things they don't really know and understand.

Also some of the voices you hear in the playground may not be first generation migrant voices. The parents may have grown up here but maintain their roots by teaching their children to be bilingual.

Adoptmama, if the evidence is easy to find, lets have a link then please. Again, I am not really interested in simply what he believes to be true, but rather the evidence and arguments he provides to support those beliefs.

As for the economic benefits of immigration the net benefit is not substantial, and no where near worth the social disruption in my view. Additionally, the benefits accrue to the rich by and large, with low skilled workers actually being made worse off. This is also a distinct issue from diversity.

And whilst it may well be true that central Europeans have been clearly economically beneficial, a large proportion of immigrants during the period of mass immigration (which is generally defined as the post war period) have been from elsewhere.

As for the economic benefits of immigration the net benefit is not substantial, and no where near worth the social disruption in my view. Additionally, the benefits accrue to the rich by and large, with low skilled workers actually being made worse off. This is also a distinct issue from diversity.
You see, this looks awfully like BNP propaganda to me, do you have empirical evidence of such?

Children don't need language to get along
That's why play is so important In nursey it won't bother a child until you put the idea in their mind
Speaking from experience
I'm asian my partner black and mixed 3 kids

Hmm research evidence...
how about
Simonton, 1999; Webber and Donohue 2001; O'Reilly et al, 1997; Williams and O'Reilly, 1998; Page, 2007; who all found, based on their research that creativity (in science, business, education etc) is enhanced by immigration.

Economic benefits e.g. Smith and Edmonton; 1997, World Bank research, 2005; Pritchett, 2006

On social cohesion e.g. Allport back in the '50's who concluded based on reseach that the more positive experiences we have interacting with people of different cultures the higher our trust and social cohesion will be. Conclusions supported by Bobo and Tuan, Brewer and Brown, and Quillian to name a few.

Adoptmama, the subject was diversity. I am sure universities can benefit their research by importing academics from overseas, but what exactly does this have to do with the social impact of diversity? And just what proportion of migrants are academics anyway?

As for the economic benefits of immigration again, this has nothing to do with diversity or the social benefits of diversity.

And as I say, the net benefits of migration are rather small kisi.deu.edu.tr/yesim.kustepeli/fiscal%20impact.pdf. I cant copy and paste from that format, but the paper in question looks at the findings of many studies into the issue. Reading the abstract alone will give you a reasonable outline.

As for finding that the more positive people's interactions with people of different races, the better social cohesion is, well thats just stating the obvious. In no way does that finding indicate that diversity benefits social cohesion, it indicates that positive interactions benefit social cohesion. I would imagine that the more positive the interactions are with people of the same race in ethnically homogeneous communities, the better social cohesion is also.

What an insightful post Dawn. Dismiss a claim as BNP propaganda whilst making no actual arguments against it. Because everyone knows that if you doubt that immigration has had substantial economic benefits, the only possible thing you can be as a member of the BNP.

Anyway, you want some empirical evidence, I'll start with the following:

kisi.deu.edu.tr/yesim.kustepeli/fiscal%20impact.pdf

Ok so Rowthorn, who you link to concludes that:

highly skilled migrants make a large fiscal contribution
unskilled migrants impose a cost on native tax payers

he concludes there is no strong fiscal case for or against large scale immigration

not exactly compelling evidence against immigration....

You're right, adoptmama, what an odd article to link to! It actually weakens leftwing 's case rather than strengthening it.

In fact a recent report commissioned by the Treasury suggests that UK immigration is economically beneficial:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/14/immigration-beneficial-uk-economy-treasury-independent-advisers

or how about this from the CEBR from last September:

Government borrowing would be higher without EU migrants
EU immigrants less likely to claim benefit and more likely to be in work than UK born citizens
Workers from established EU countries more likely to earn more than British workers and work in more senior jobs.
Tighter immigration controls will result in a loss of 2 per cent from GDP by 2050, £60billion in real terms. And without migrants from the EU helping to off-set the UK’s ageing population, government borrowing would be 0.5% higher.

etc.etc.etc.

www.cebr.com/reports/migration-benefits-to-the-uk/

and another

or this:

on average immigrants are better educated and better skilled than their UK counterparts

immigrants are less likely to be in social housing than their UK

counterparts even when arriving from a developing country

immigrants are over-represented in both the very highly skilled and very low skilled groups. The UK has worker shortages in both these areas.

of course the report is from that hotbed of socialism, LSE
but then Rowthorn, who you leftwingechochamber link to above, is a known Marxist...

cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/pa014.pdf

Bradford is highly ghettoised, and it's true that some schools are mostly Asian, and some mostly white. Mainly because they lie in 'white' or 'Asian' areas. And then there's other schools which lie on the borders of these areas and are much more intregated. In my daughter's class there are Muslims, Sikhs, Polish, African, travellers and uk white. I'm okay with this. I like how they celebrate Eid and Christmas and Diwali. Not all the parents like it, I hear a lot of crap in the playground. Racism is a huge problem here, and I'm not sure it will ever be solved.

Adoptmama, firstly, you are still dodging the issue we were actually discussing, namely evidence of the socially beneficial effects of diversity, not the economic impact of immigration.

Secondly, I never claimed there was a compelling economic case against immigration. What I said was:

"As for the economic benefits of immigration the net benefit is not substantial, and no where near worth the social disruption in my view."

So I am not arguing that immigration is economically catastrophic, I am arguing it does not provide a substantial benefit (and additionally is regressive), and couple that with the demonstrable social harm caused by ethnic diversity (which has been massively increased by recent immigration), and overall, the case is firmly against immigration.

As for the treasury report, it says:

"Treasury select committee told foreign workers more likely to be of working age, contribute in taxes and help public purse"

Well unless all foreign workers are Peter Pan, they too will grow old. So the fact that they are disproportionately of working age now is no argument that they will be of long term economic benefit. Indeed, as the paper I linked to indicates, the net fiscal impact of GPD in advanced nations is very small, ranging from -1% of GDP to +1% of GDP. That kind of benefit is far too small to justify radical demographic transformation.

As for the following study which was referenced by Dawn:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24813467

The findings of that study are hardly uncontested:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10693022/Immigrants-cost-Britain-3000-a-year-each-says-report.html

"MigrationWatch accused the authors of the UCL report, Prof Christian Dustmann and Dr Tommaso Frattini of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, of burying a crucial figure in an annexe of their original report, published in November.
It was claimed the UCL study found the overall impact of immigration had been £95 billion but this “was not even mentioned in the text of the report”, said MigrationWatch.
It added that the omission was “truly astonishing”."

And adoptmama references the following:

www.cebr.com/reports/migration-benefits-to-the-uk/

refers specifically to "established European countries", so isnt representative of immigration as a whole. In any case, the benefits it points to are very small. Tightening immigration will, by 2050, lower GDP by a whole 2%. Well shock horror. And I am sure you can accurately predict changes that small over a 36 year period.

And aside from the blatant cherry picking going on here (you will notice the link I provided was specifically one which looked at the overall findings of many studies using many methodologies, not simply the studies which I found convenient), even if we take this selective evidence at face value, we are talking about rather small changes here. Since when was it justified to radically alter the demographics of a country to reduce government borrowing by 0.5%?

You could improve the economy by far more than that if, for example, you had mandatory euthanasia at 70. But there is actually more to life than a a percentage point or two of GDP either way.

I don't believe I have 'dodged' any issues.

I have given you links to peer reviewed research which documents the evidence based benefits on education, business, science, employment and economic growth of immigration. That is social benefit.

Nor have I cherry picked anything - unlike what you did earlier with Putnam's findings on multiculturalism and diversity which you falsely claimed concluded that "its impact is overwhelmingly negative'. Your link above may, as you claim, have 'looked at the overall findings of many studies using many methodologies' but er... so did some of the links I gave you. So what?

Just because the research I provided links to support an opposite view to yours does not mean they are cherry picked or, more importantly, wrong.

There is little point - ever - to forum discussions like these. They do not make people change their minds from entrenched opinion. However they do at times serve the useful purpose of highlighting the ignorance behind some bigoted opinions and the deliberate use of misinformation to support them.

You have come on this thread and been from the start belligerant and hostile - calling other posters for example 'self righteous arseholes.' You make false accusations to try to discredit other posters e.g. by claiming I have 'dodged the issue' or by making sarcastic comments to other posters rather than actually genuinely addressing the content of the information. You are all smoke and mirrors with nothing of substance to back up your claims.

Wait... wait... I can get this... You're Nigel Farage, aren't you?

What a load of shit. You do the very thing you accuse anyone who disagrees with you of - cherry pick.

And what's this about euthanasia at 70? Wasn't that something a UKIP member put forward?

and to anything further you post I simply want to say....

yawn

you're getting a bit repetitive love.

do widzenia

No, those things are economic benefits. You are being disingenuous. We were originally discussing the charge that I was misrepresenting Putnam's findings on the impact of DIVERSITY (not immigration) on SOCIAL COHESION (not the economy). So far, you have produced no data which contradicts the findings I presented.

And whilst it isnt cherry picking to pick sources which disagree with me, it is to exclusively pick sources which agree with you, even when there are plenty to the contrary, and on top of that, sources which dont look at immigration as a whole, but rather a quite specific and highly productive category of immigrants. Twice you referred to established Europeans. To quote your own source:

"Those migrants from the established EU 14 countries* are more likely to be in higher managerial or professional occupations and they also earn 7.6% (£2,035) on average more than UK workers."

EU 14 excludes all of Eastern Europe. Given that the number of Western European migrants is dwarfed by the number of Eastern European, South Asian and African migrants, how exactly is this not cherry picking?

As for belligerence, I have taken more than I have dished out. And I make no apologies for describing posts like the following as being a self righteous arsehole:

"YABU. I wouldn't talk to you, either - you sound horrible! Move somewhere whiter if you hate foreigners so much."

"A few thoughts...
Firstly this thread doesn't have racist undertones, it has racist over, under and sideways tones. It s racist.
Secondly, op you live in Surrey so who the fuck are you trying to kid that you are in the minority? In Surrey?
I live in east London and I am not in a minority. Well I am in my house, being te only white one, but once I get out the door I am still the majority I.e White/British

You perceive yourself as under siege from the violent offspring of lazy foreigners because you are a bigot. Sort that out and you will be a lot happier.
HTH"

Those are the posts I had in mind. I never claimed it was everyone who disagreed with the OP, I specifically said it was the people who thought she was profoundly immoral merely for being concerned about the number of english speaking children.