Crisis looms in the ghetto

September 25, 2005, The Sunday Times.
Letter by David Coleman


YOUR thoughtful review of Britain’s “ghetto crisis” assumes that it “will continue” (Focus and Editorial, last week). There is nothing inevitable about large-scale immigration nor anything particularly desirable, as David Smith showed recently. It has been pushed up by post-1997 government policy. The Danish and the Netherlands governments have shown it can be brought down as well.

Further immigration must mean bigger ethnic areas, potentially even more self-sufficient and isolated than today.

Moderation of immigration will not of itself solve issues of integration but is a fundamental prerequisite for it, particularly in relation to arranged marriage from abroad. This is both a potent and growing driver of immigration, a powerful impediment to integration.

Commission for Racial Equality propaganda has seldom wavered in its hostility to immigration controls, rejecting any notion that lower immigration might be a key to better integration. Sleepwalking to disaster indeed. It is perhaps time the CRE was exposed to harder scrutiny about its agenda, its powers and its purpose.

David Coleman
Professor of Demography
Oxford

© Copyright of Professor Coleman
The Sunday Times, London, 25 September, 2005

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