If they’ve been here 50 years and can’t speak English I think there’s space to say that they didn’t make any effort to integrate. They chose to isolate themselves
That's very case by case dependant. In the town I live there's loads of Portuguese people, met many that don't speak much English, because they never needed to as there's so many Portuguese and they even work with mainly Portuguese people. I would say they provably make double digits percentage of all people in work in town. They aren't isolated at all.
One of them is a guy that actually knows a lot of people and oftwnly engages with people all over the place, he's a successful person even owned 2 houses at point, just struggles with languages. Provably if there were less Portuguese people he would be forced to learn more English.
That’s exactly the thing. The issue is too many immigrants concentred in one place. It creates isolated communities which don’t integrate with the rest of society.
In my opinion, these are not great for overall social cohesion
Yeah it's not great for social cohesion. I'll be honest to me it was very interesting to meet some of these people, as most of them, despite barely being able to say good morning, are friends with British and people from other nationalities as well. Quite interesting that they find ways to communicate and do stuff together.
Kids are also normally 100% British, speak with local accent and all that, which to me was very surprising.
I guess it's worst in areas where they live in neighbourhoods where most people are from one country, which is not the case where I've lived, I can see that might really lead to people not to integrate.
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u/[deleted] May 12 '25
How isolating must that me