The Government’s own prediction shows our overcrowded island swelling by at least 2.1 million immigrants…. It could mean London ending up having Third World-style shanty towns springing up in the shadows of the City’s gleaming skyscrapers … the boom will put unbearable strain on schools, hospitals, roads and railways … without controls on the numbers coming here we will face a future of public services struggling to cope. The Sun newspaper

Introduction

The view that integration of immigrants is not possible is among the most prevalent and pervasive of the race and migration myths. It is at the heart of much anti-immigration and anti-minority sentiment in contemporary Britain. Like all persistent myths it benefits from poor definitions and imprecise concepts.

Chapter Three discussed claims that immigration is the main cause of population growth; that Britain takes more than its fair share of immigrants and that immigration is economically costly. This chapter investigates first the claim that immigrants cannot be integrated because they place too great a burden on space, housing and state resources. Second, it considers the claim that problems are caused not only by increased numbers of people but by increased ethnic diversity. The chapter argues that, on the contrary, immigrants and ethnic minorities take up less space and no more resources than others, and that ethnic diversity is not a burden but is one more dimension of difference that services handle democratically in the same way as gender and age.

In this chapter more than in others in this book, the distinction between immigrants and minorities is very blurred. The myth draws strength from the indistinct nature of these categories. For example, the extension of the concept of immigrants needing extra resources – which is easily associated with initial settlement in a new country – to ethnic minorities who have mostly been born and have lived all their lives in Britain and who therefore have no requirement for help in settlement, exaggerates the fear that the myth promotes. We talk about both recent immigrants and ethnic minorities in this chapter but we aim to specify who we are referring to at each point, and to point out when the myth conflates concepts of different populations.

The origins of the myth

The fear that immigrants will place a burden on the resources of society dates back at least to the middle of the 20th century.