Migrants and Their Children in Britain: Generational Change in Patterns of Ethnic Minority Integration

Do second-generation ethnic minorities, those born and brought up in Britain, increasingly adopt British attitudes, values and ways or life, or do they, as some commentators have claimed, remain isolated from the mainstream? This study maps the extent of generational change among Britain’s ethnic minority population and explores the underlying processes involved. It asks whether generational change has been in the direction of greater integration, or whether some minorities been slower to integrate, perhaps as a result of the prejudice and discrimination from the white British that they have encountered or because of desires to maintain ethnic values and resist Western practices.

The study draws on the most recent and most authoritative British data to answer these questions. Chapter authors include leading authorities both from Britain and America, including Mary Waters (Harvard), Lucinda Platt (LSE) and Anthony Heath, CBE (Oxford and Manchester) as well as a new generation of young scholars. It will be essential reading both for students and scholars working on ethnic relations and for policy-makers and the wider public interested in questions of social cohesion, multiculturalism and integration.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Anthony Heath is one of Britain’s foremost sociologists and received a CBE for services to social science in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. He has published extensively on issues of ethnic inequality and integration and has carried out research both for international bodies such as UNDP and for British government departments.