Jon Bloomfield offers a resolutely positive view of the lived experience of migrants to the city of Birmingham and their contribution to the city’s economy and culture. Successive chapters deal with the NHS, the upward mobility of second-generation immigrants, entrepreneurship, higher education, low pay, racism, schooling, faith, and family structures.
Upbeat
Illustrated throughout by direct quotations from the forty-six people he interviewed, Bloomfield’s book exposes the multiple challenges that migrants faced as they pitched up against successive changes in the British economy. It also advances persuasive arguments for continued close engagement with Europe and contrasts the relatively successful policies of Birmingham City Council with those of successive national administrations. Throughout, a clear middle course is steered between policies of outright assimilation and forms of multiculturalism that fetishize ethnic identities.
The thematically organized chapters are interrupted from time to time by what may best be termed ‘policy interludes,’ during which the telephoto is replaced by the wide-angle lens. One of these deals with structural change in retail trade, as immigrant-owned corner shops have struggled to deal with the rise of local branches of the big supermarket chains, the decline of the print-press (and smoking?). One of the shopkeepers interviewed has succeeded spectacularly, diversifying from the processing of holiday snaps into niches such as the restoration of old photos or the manipulation of digital images.
