I suspect that many of the violent protests that we have seen in the last few months have been initiated by the same people involved in football and ice hockey hooliganism. For example the recent razing of the Olten CFF station.
These are not people that actually support a particular sports team or a particular cause, but people that just want a good fight. They don’t give a sh*t about anything other than hitting somebody or destroying something.
The recent riots in Lausanne are another example of this, where people traveled from all over just to join in the “fun”.
So immigrants seem to have some weirdly split personality; they are allegedly uneducated, living off benefits or only capable of menial work such as working in a barber shop but somehow have the criminal mastermind intent on colonising cities and taking over countries?
Coming from London, I’m used to a rich mosaic of cultures that only the most blinkered and nimbyist would mistake for ghettoisation.
Edgware Road – Middle Eastern
Golders Green – Jewish
Stamford Hill – Haredi Jewish
Wood Green – Turkish and Greek Cypriot
Southall – South Asian, especially Punjabi and Sikh
Kingsbury – Iraqi and broader Middle Eastern
Peckham – Nigerian and West African
Ladbroke Grove – North African
Kensington / Earl’s Court – Iranian / Persian
Brixton – Afro-Caribbean
Chinatown (Soho) – Chinese
Highgate / Hampstead – French and other continental European
Lewisham / Deptford – Ghanaian and Congolese
Brick Lane / Whitechapel – Bangladeshi
Acton – Polish, Somali, and long-standing Irish community
West Acton – Japanese (“Little Tokyo”)
Stoke Newington – Turkish and Jewish
Stockwell – Portuguese (“Little Portugal”)
South Kensington – French
Its only natural that people with the same language, cultural, food and shopping preferences would want to form their own communities. Just look at places like Benidorm, Torrevieja, Orihuela Costa, Fuengirola, and Camposol where English is often the working language. You’ll find UK-style pubs, fish-and-chip shops and even councils catering to expats i.e. they’re effectively British towns under the Spanish sun.
the only complain I have with the Swiss-style sandwiches and burgers is the mandatory Gherkin… I mean why? why? Can they not make a burger without Gherkin?
Do these communities you mention mingle, adjust and integrate, or do they keep seperate. Just like Marxloh in Duisburg, the Khyber pass in Blackburn, Molenbeek… these are the bad places from an outsidsrs point of view but a protective paradise for those in the community.
Its another example of tribal behaviors and woe betide an outsider or the government who tries to change that, that is when you get the no-go areas as backlash.
This is where political parties like AfD and the rest of them get the ammo to change opinions of otherwise rational tbinking persons to right wing tendencies
A mixture of both. Many in the younger generation study, work and mix with other Londoners, so they are very much part of the wider society even if their roots are still in their own communities. After a few generations, as they become more assimilated and English becomes their first language, many move to other parts of the city because staying in the old enclave can start to feel quite stifling I guess.
A good example are The East European and Russian Jews who arrived in East London in the 1900s establishing shops, synagogues and a huge tailoring trade. After a few generations as they became more affluent and English, they moved North to the leafier suburbs of Golders Green, Hendon, Finchley etc.. Those East London Jews were then followed by Bangladeshis and you see the same trajectory from the 60’s until today.
Wait till someone fills you in with the last few centuries of the UK’s multicultural history as a result of its sea-faring, trading, commonwealth activities around the globe. Don’t think there’s a single person in the UK that can claim they don’t have SOME overseas DNA in them.
The communities, food, language and culture has been defined by this patchwork.
That would of course be the optimal way, but it would seem that exactly the opposite is happening, these next generations struggle to assimilate, not only that they are openly hostile to the leading culture in their country of residence and as they become more and more decoupled to their parents way of life tension rises as they dont seem to be able to run conform with the culture of the country and get left behind.
This is where the radicalization of the young finds ferile ground.
I was actually looking at it from the perspective of Switzerland. Still, I think the logic applies in the UK as well - if it’s natural for ethnic minorities to want their own communities with their own culture, then it would be equally natural for native people to want to retain theirs.
You speak as though they always have a choice. I cannot speak for Germany, but in France the pervasive racism and the de facto ghettoisation of immigrants in banlieues on the outskirts of cities contributes significantly to the alienation of many Moroccan and Algerian youth. They’re often unable to secure good jobs because their names or faces do not fit the expected profile, and those that do often face a glass ceiling into overwhelmingly white/French senior management.
I had two master’s degrees from the Sorbonne and not a single call for an interview. The moment I changed my name, replacing Ait-Taleb with Le Clerc, I received hundreds of calls," asserts the writer Xavier Le Clerc in “A Man Without a Title,” his third novel published by Gallimard.
I used to have a French-Algerian colleague with a PhD in pharmaceutics who was an EU Qualified Person for Pharmaceutical release. He could not progress beyond ‘Manager’ at Pierre Fabre in Paris, so he moved with his family to Switzerland as a Snr Director and has never looked back.
So they can’t live in their own communities; And when a middle-class black family moves to a white area they’re made to feel less than welcome.
Local reporting and community posts from Penrith, Cumbria, describe racist graffiti sprayed on a Black family’s new house, with the words “no n*****s” daubed on the property shortly after they moved in.
Black tenant forced out after racist campaign by neighbours (London & Quadrant case)
A 2020 county court case involved L&Q Housing Association and “Lara Tate” (pseudonym), a young Black woman tenant in London. After she moved into her flat, her white neighbours launched a racist campaign:
Repeated racist abuse, including chants such as “who let the monkeys out”
Banging on her door, slamming communal doors, and eventually issuing death threats
She fled the flat and became effectively homeless. The court found that L&Q had failed to protect her, despite knowing of previous racist harassment of a Black tenant in the same property, and awarded her £31,000 in damages.
Immigrants are not driving anyone out, just occupying an empty space because “locals” moved somewhere else with more modern buildings or single-family houses.
It’s very easy to tell “how much the neighborhood has changed”. But, the only way to prevent that change is to not allow people to leave. If people just stays in the neighborhood until their deaths, nothing will change. So, no more marriages, divorces, open relationships, stop having children, forget about moving to a newer building with floor heating or a single-family house if you make more money. For the sake of the neighborhood culture, people is bounded to their apartments…of course this is a fever dream, no way this is compatible with the very much Western idea of individualism and personal freedoms.
Ever thought about the possibility that politics can stop people getting in, but can’t do anything at all about people leaving?
Where is the contradiction? I am saying that its natural to find communities of similar races and nationalities in a city; but what’s also true is that many are not accepted in certain white areas, thus re-enforcing their ‘safety in community’ mindset.
Of course not, racism is prevalent in every culture
