Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [16]
All around the close, the children who joined the sisters sitting against the wall in 1995 are following similar paths. Their neighbor, a man who looks far older than his 60 years, owns two adjoining houses, which he bought after a terrible ordeal. He came over alone in the late 1950s, saved for years to set up a garment sweatshop and employ several dozen Bangladeshi villagers, and then was bankrupted when that industry collapsed in the 1970s, forcing him to become a bricklayer and odd-job man, too poor to bring his family over. But his collection of East End London property proved his salvation, multiplying in value many times over and allowing him, after 30 lonely and health-destroying years, to bring his extended family over and live comfortably. Now his children, nephews, and nieces—more than 10 of whom have lived in these houses at one time or another—are doctors, teachers, civil servants, computer scientists. The children of the close are united in a set of aspirations: to be accepted in the center of British society, to own a house, and never to work in a curry restaurant. Almost all of them, especially the girls, have managed this.
What has made the children of this small street flourish and others flounder? It may partly be the street itself. “I think more than just luck. It’s something to do with living in a close,” says Salma Tafader. “We all know each other’s names, our parents know each other from when we’re babies, we all went to the same schools, did the same activities, the same camping trips. You looked out for each other.” Around the world, it appears that a good part of the success or failure of an arrival city has to do with its physical form—the layout of streets and buildings, the transportation links to the economic and cultural core of the city, the direct access to the street from buildings, the proximity to schools, health centers and social services, the existence of a sufficiently high density of housing, the presence of parks and neutral public spaces, the ability to open a shop on the ground floor and add rooms to your dwelling.
Many Tower Hamlets Bangladeshis still live in the sort of housing the Tafaders escaped, the council-estate housing tower in a blank concrete square. Although many successful families come from such quarters, they say the physical design is holding them back. Laila Nura, 32, who lives in the Peabody Buildings in Bethnal Green, says, “I don’t have any connection to jobs, I can’t see a way to buy my house, and I have nothing that can let me start a small business—I was better off back in the village in Sylhet.” The only reason she hasn’t moved out is because her children are doing very well in school and applying for high-level jobs in computer programming.
The Bangladeshi arrival city of London may be portrayed, with some truth, as a place of crime, religious extremism, and ill health, but it has also functioned for its second generation as a great integration machine. The London-born Bangladeshis, the children of the curry-house owners and sweatshop workers, have marched into the center of British society. They perform better in school than less concentrated immigrant groups and considerably better than the local white English population. In Tower Hamlets, 46 percent of Bangladeshi students achieved passing grades in five General Certificate of Secondary Education courses, only slightly below the national average of 51 percent and far better than the 30 percent achieved by the borough’s white students.12 And once they finish their educations, they have a far easier time moving out of subsistence-level employment. Studies have shown that it is much easier for immigrants to start a small business in London than in other European cities,