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By Root 1703 0

making it far more likely that the arrival city here will be a toehold rather than a trap.13 The curry restaurant was the quintessential, and largely very successful, form of entrepreneurship for village arrivals, a self-built economic and cultural rescue package, but the second generation have turned their back on the food trade, with its crushingly hard work, high risk, and ethnic stereotypes, instead entering finance, government, education, and information technology, with a significant and increasingly visible number of arrival-city children in national politics, media, and academia. Most still send money back to the village, but increasingly only on holidays. There are now as many Bangladeshi Britons departing Tower Hamlets for middle-class districts of London each year as there are arriving from Sylheti villages. This neighborhood, in other words, is a functioning integration machine.14

So it is with some accuracy that one group of scholars referred to the East End as “the traditional waiting room for admission into British society.”15 Indeed, the greatest public worry about Tower Hamlets during the past decade has involved the white English working-class residents, who are falling so far behind the village-migrant families that they are becoming an isolated, dependent, and angry underclass—a big problem, but an inversion of the one facing arrival cities of continental Europe, where it is the migrants who are the lost underclass. Still, the arrival city has not worked for all the villagers here. Many end up trapped, working at dead-end jobs, living in housing-project estates, uneducated, barely literate, unable to grab hold of the wider society around them. While upward social mobility is the norm for immigrant enclaves in London, a significant part of the Bangladeshi population does not manage fully to arrive.16

Razeema’s husband, Asad, a first cousin (her mother’s sister’s son), worries that this is his fate. He is a villager who learned little English before his family found him a bride in London—in large part because tightened immigration laws had made the arranged marriage a necessary tool for reuniting villages, even though it revived a conservative practice that had been nearly obsolete among Bangladeshis. He now works at that new East London institution, the fried-chicken takeout named after a southern U.S. state (with the word “halal” appended), working the fryer 10 hours a day. Like a number of young men here, he does not seem to have a place in either British or Bangladeshi culture. He is a sad byproduct of the arrival process, a result of policies that do not fully comprehend how these neighborhoods function.

Still, the London arrival city has functioned better than those in Berlin, Paris, or Amsterdam and offers considerable lessons for the Latino arrival-city enclaves in the United States. After the terrible educational failings of the 1980s and early ’90s, there is now a robust and well-invested education system, with many special programs aimed at immigrants and dedicated teachers versed in arrival; all the Tafader sisters credit their state secondary school with giving them their advantage. There is genuine citizenship: 85 percent of arrival-city residents have U.K. citizenship, compared with 42 percent of Turks in Germany. And the difference is not just in legal citizenship but in de facto citizenship: Despite the screaming headlines in the tabloids, British society, especially in the big cities, increasingly sees the arrival city as a source of fellow citizens, not as an alien threat. In Britain, 82 percent of Bangladeshis say their ethnic and religious background does not affect their job prospects, compared with 54 percent of Turks in Germany.17 The eastern side of Tower Hamlets, in Spitalfields and Brick Lane, has become a popular eating and gallery-going attraction for well-off Britons and a residential colony for artists, turning the arrival city, for the established urban population, into a destination rather than an isolated exile to be avoided.

For all that, the more successful members