Immigration: the absurdity of integration

By Richard North - March 13, 2026

Although largely submerged by the Iran war, comment on the government’s new cohesion strategy, published on Monday, continues to find its way into the legacy media and elsewhere.

One of the latest offerings is from David Frost in the Telegraph, writing under the headline: “Labour knows national cohesion is collapsing, but it’s chosen cowardice”, the sub-head telling us: “If the Government was serious about social cohesion it would be offering more than the incoherent blather of its latest strategy”.

Railing against the “muddled, disorganised and robotic writing”, Frost complains that the strategy is “among the most badly-written government papers” he has had the misfortune to read, contrasting his take of the problem compared with the government’s analysis.

In his terms, it can be quite easily described: over the last few decades, and especially in recent years, we have invited into this country large numbers of migrants from very different cultures. This, he says, has changed the character of parts of our major cities and towns.

Not only has it generated a specific security threat from a small minority within these communities, it has also led to a larger problem of integration – the parallel and distinct lives often led by these newer communities; and, finally, caused significant economic stresses as a consequence.

On the other hand, while the cohesion strategy occasionally touches on this situation. Frost argues that it cannot bring itself to describe it honestly, clearly, or at any length. When it tries, he says, the issue is framed mainly as a problem generated by the existing population for engaging in “hatred and hostility”, for which the remedies are education and training plus a further crackdown on hate crime.

However, while one can have some sympathy with that view, it doesn’t actually reflect the entire scope of the document which, at one point, claims that “integration into the UK has generally been a success story over decades” but also admits that this “success” hasn’t been universal.

It refers to multiple reviews, from Ted Cantle, to Baroness Casey, through to Dame Sara Khan, which have warned of communities in the UK living segregated or parallel lives and conceded that when communities live separate lives from others around them “this can exacerbate tensions and limit the opportunities that a diverse society brings”.

In an earlier piece, I did in fact quote from the Cantle report, published in 2003 following the Bradford riots in 2001 and elsewhere in Northern towns.

The report noted that, whilst the physical segregation of housing estates and inner-city areas had come as no surprise, “the team was particularly struck by the depth of polarisation of our towns and cities”. The extent to which these physical divisions were compounded by so many other aspects of our daily lives, it said, “was very evident”.

Cantle went on to write: “Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges”.

What the government is doing is its current report is very much playing down the extent to which these communities are living separate lives, but the reality of this situation has been going on far longer that the government is prepared to concede, for reasons which it almost entirely ignores.

While its timescale takes us back only to 2001, I have mentioned previously that I have been reading Muhammad Anwar’s book “The Myth of Return – Pakistanis in Britain”, which actually dates back to 1989 when it was first published.

To some extent the book tells us a lot of what we already know, or could have worked out, but the conclusion chapter pulls a lot of threads together which knocks the government’s cohesion strategy into a cocked hat as it looks at the behaviour of the Pakistani community in Rochdale.

“The Pakistanis studied”, Anwar says, “regard Britain as a foreign country, unwelcoming to immigrants. They perceive prejudice and discrimination against coloured immigrants in general and Pakistanis in particular”.

Crucially, “they also face language barriers which lead to several other difficulties and increase their dependence on one another. So they turn to their own relatives, friends and countrymen for help, assistance and security”.

Anwar then refers to a 1970 book by John Brown, entitled “The un-melting pot: an English town and its immigrants”, where he writes about South Italians in Bedford.

He, states, “The world of the first generation is the static world of Southern Italy. Its intensive feeling for the primacy of the family group, its religious respect for the authority of the father, its seclusion and control of unmarried women, its devotion to the Church: all have the force of permanent, unquestioned values. Here is Europea at its most traditional and inflexible”. To this, the world of Bedford is entirely irrelevant, the notion of integration is an absurdity”.

Although this is referenced to South Italians, Anwar thinks that this is “clearly pertinent to the situation among Pakistanis in Rochdale” – particularly the line: “the notion of integration is an absurdity”.

An important aspect of any situation is the availability of the means to pursue particular goals, says Anwar. The whole complex of ethnic institutions manifests the community’s wish not merely to express but also to defend and perpetuate their traditional social norms, beliefs and ethnic identity.

Pakistanis try to recreate their old community around them in Rochdale but because of the move from the villages in Pakistan to urban areas it cannot be exactly the same. With them, the significance of the colour question and of a different religious system may make for a greater differentiation from the British society.

Out of necessity, he says. they have formed something different from Pakistan because of situational differences, while the underlying principles remain the same because their aspirations are bound to the homeland where most of them wish to retire,

Their relatives in Pakistan expect them to return, and they themselves mention their plans and ambitions. Their obligations to their kin and their economic ties, in the way of remittances, investments and visits, with Pakistan keep alive the wish to return, and so they do not wish to change their norms and values while in Britain. Their ambition and status are related to Pakistan and not Britain.

On the other hand, the lifestyles of those who came from peasant agricultural backgrounds, irrespective of their country of origin, have fundamental similarities which are different from the industrial urban way of life.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Pakistani migration in Britain is the strong inference to be drawn from the life-styles of Pakistanis in Britain, that they have no long-term ambition of settling here. For an average Pakistani, migration means that though he has come to Britain for economic reasons, he is never able to feel that he has come for good.

Even if he thought he had come here permanently, there are kin and friends in Pakistan who cannot follow him because of immigration restrictions. By definition, therefore, the Pakistani migrant is a person whose network of relations cannot be located in Britain alone.

Things have changed since 1970 in that Anwar was describing first-generation immigrants and, throughout his book, he ventures that the second and subsequent generations may respond differently. But, as I have described, the situation has got worse. What little integration we have seen has gone sharply into reverse.

But what Anwar brings sharply into focus is the fact that Pakistani family groups are transnational, spanning Britain and Pakistan so that, while migrants may live here, they never truly belong for the very reason that their ties, their loyalties and their community wealth lie with their extended families and not with Britain.

The upshot of this is that the notion of integration is indeed an absurdity. No matter what the pretentions and aspirations of successive governments, integration will never happen because the Pakistanis themselves do not want it and take active measures to prevent it from happening. The segregation is of their own making

Thus, when the government tells us in its strategy that “we expect everyone who lives here to treat others with respect. At the same time, we also rightly expect new arrivals to make an effort to integrate into our shared culture and respect our traditions and uphold our values”, this is simply meaningless prattle.

As long as we have governments living in this fantasy land, we will never come to terms with the parasitic incubus living in our midst. By their own reckoning they don’t belong here and the only rational policy is to take them at their word and reunite them with their homeland.