Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [15]
For the Tafader family, change came slowly. After living for 10 years in a dismal high-rise East London housing estate with overtly racist neighbors, their restaurant earnings gave them enough to buy a small house, also with two bedrooms, in Coverley Close, which was developed in the 1980s to fill a cleared-out slum backlot in what had been one of the squalid quarters made famous in Dickens. This placed the Tafader family in the most dense and ethnically concentrated pole in London’s Banglatown, one of Europe’s great arrival cities, spreading eastward from its symbolic edge in Brick Lane across the dense expanses of Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Stepney, and West Ham and soon sending its more successful members into Essex, covering much of the eastern fringe of the city.
By that summer of 1995, it seemed as if Banglatown was collapsing on itself. Bloody clashes between neo-Nazi skinheads and Bangladeshi gangs filled the papers. Tower Hamlets was suffering a full-scale outbreak of tuberculosis, a disease mainly prevalent in developing-world slums. Studies found that a third of families there were living on less than £4,500 a year; two-thirds of children were poor enough to qualify for free school meals, neglected housing was literally crumbling in on families, and the borough ranked lowest in Britain for standard of living, health, and quality of education. Overcrowding was five times worse than the national average, with numerous reports of three children sharing a bed, and male unemployment was more than double the national rate.11 Britain had come to view this arrival city as a social problem, an island of gang violence, religious extremism and backwardness, made infamous through clashes with racist skinheads, the riots and protests against The Satanic Verses and the Iraq War, the bristle of minarets supplanting the steeples and synagogues of its cockney past. The new arrival cities of Europe and North America have plumbing, sewage and Internet access, but they are sometimes as alien and threatening to their native populations as the slums of Asia are to their cities’ established residents.
Over the next 15 years, as the second generation came of age and the first generation put its savings to work on education and housing, things changed dramatically in Tower Hamlets. Today, you can still come by on many evenings and find the Tafader sisters in front of their family’s tiny house, talking with the neighbors. The oldest daughter, Razeema, 33, has moved out with her new husband, Asad, to live in a minuscule one-bedroom flat, but she drops by most evenings to do her laundry and visit her sisters. Except for their ages, it might still be 1995. The changes become apparent in the morning, when the girls leave for work. Razeema walks to the local government office, where she is a parent-outreach officer for the school board; 30-year-old Sulama takes the bus to a secondary school, where she is a math teacher; and 28-year-old Salma rides the Tube to Whitehall, where she has a government management job organizing a new identity-card program. Their brother Zahir, 32, has a steady job as a car salesman and leads a somewhat adolescent life of leisure and entertainment; their youngest brother, 26, is severely autistic and cared for by his aging parents. The wall of their tiny front room is covered with big photographs of the three girls in their university graduation robes. The Tafader girls have degrees in biology, education, and public administration; they speak with the rounded vowels of the educated middle class, leavened with East End inflections: in lighter moments, their sentences end with “innit.” They consider themselves feminists and don’t want children until they’re much older, if at all, and one of them abandoned an early marriage because she found it demeaning, though they are also devout Muslims. Their headscarves are the norm in East London but a subject of ridicule in