Graduation day at Bradford University, July 2016. Flickr/Tim Green. Some rights reserved.During a year in which our country has seemed more divided than at any point in modern history, there are few questions which require investigation more urgently than the matter of how well we are living together. Equally, however – at a time in which our political debate has become yet more polarised and media headlines yet more fraught – there are few questions which it can seem harder to get to the bottom of.
Too often, it seems as if our national debate on immigration and diversity is hopelessly, irreconcilably divided. Split between one group of voices claiming that Britain is full and that it’s time to shut our borders, and another insisting that it’s only a fundamentally backwards and prejudiced minority who believe that immigration poses any sort of risk to community cohesion.
That’s why this report, authored by two of our country’s leading experts on social integration, is so important. Cutting through all the noise and the intense disagreement which has previously characterised the academic debate on patterns of residential segregation, Professors Cantle and Kaufmann have produced a forensic and fascinating insight into the reality of our national experience of diversity.
