• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1682 0

on the edge of the world’s financial capital, took less than 40 years, though its challenges were in many ways tougher than those facing a Chinese peasant, the urban surroundings no less improvised and awkward, the odds of finding a place in a foreign city with an alien language seemingly far longer. In the 1960s, the entire clan lived, as it had for decades, in a cluster of wood shacks, without electricity or even a road, around a treed patch amid rice paddies, in a rural corner of Bangladesh. The family saved to send Yousef, at age 17, to England, in search of any work he could find. Like most arrivals, he drew on contacts from fellow villagers who had moved back and forth doing industrial and shipping-port work over the previous decades. By the time Yousef arrived, the British manufacturing economy had collapsed, so he settled for a near-slavery job as a house servant for a Pakistani family; they kept his passport locked away. All his earnings went back to the village. He managed to quit after almost a decade and followed tens of thousands of other post-industrial Bangladeshis in remaking the British food-service industry, opening a small curry restaurant on the cheapest patch of land he could afford in the depressed London of the 1970s. His restaurant savings allowed him to bring his wife over, to start a family in London, and to start saving to buy a house.

The tens of thousands of curry houses, almost all of them Bangladeshi-owned, may have become an ethnic cliché, as well as turning chicken tikka masala, an invention of a 1960s Bangladeshi arrival city in Scotland, into Britain’s favorite dish, but it also proved a salvation. The easy ability to open a small business in Britain, to get credit and purchase property and obtain restaurant licences without prejudice, allowed the Bangladeshis to avoid destitution and dependency, to accumulate capital and provide legitimate employment to new arrivals as British immigration laws toughened, and to build futures for their children over the hot tandoori ovens. Small businesses of this sort are at the heart of almost any successful arrival city, and their absence, or the presence of laws that keep immigrants from opening them, is often the factor that turns arrival cities into poverty traps.

The Tafaders are among the 300,000 Bangladeshi villagers who have migrated to Britain since the 1960s, at least 90 percent of whom have come directly from the remote, very poor, completely agricultural northeast district of Sylhet.a Almost half a million Bangladeshis and their British-born children now live in Britain, half of them in London, and half of these on the eastern edge of the City of London, in Tower Hamlets, where they form over a quarter of the population across the council and, in some wards, are a majority. Much of the function of the Tower Hamlets arrival city is devoted to the transfer of cash, information, and people: the high streets are jammed with money-wiring shops, Islamic finance offices, Bangladeshi travel agencies, Internet cafés, immigration consultancies, marriage-arrangement offices. All of these businesses, and many of the spare-time activities of the residents here, are devoted to establishing a homeostatic relationship between village and city. This is what arrival cities do.

Each year, rural Bangladesh receives almost $11 billion in remittances from migrants and their descendants living abroad, a sum equivalent to all of Bangladesh’s export earnings, far larger and more effective than all the foreign aid coming into Bangladesh each year, the largest single chunk of it coming from the Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets.10 As in arrival cites all over the world, this flow serves two important functions: It transforms the constant tide of villagers into financially secure and culturally successful urbanites, and it transforms the village, through infusions of cash, into a more urban and cultured place, which can support itself. As the arrival city becomes older and more established, the remittances decline in amount and frequency, but even in 70-year-old arrival-city