Indians break class barriers in UK

LONDON: Second-generation Indian immigrants are breaking their adopted country’s class barriers with consistent ease and steaming ahead of much of white, black and brown Britain, new research has found.

The research, which tracked 140,000 children born in England and Wales over a 30-year period, found that a massive 56 per cent second-generation Indians sailed over class barriers and went into professional or managerial posts, compared with just per cent of white children.

In a further breakdown of what it called the “Indian success story”, the study added that Being Hindu or Jewish enhanced the probability of a professional/managerial class outcome, other things being equal, while being Muslim, Sikh or from a religious group other than the main religions made such a destination less likely”.
However, the study admitted that today’s immigrant successes could not discount the reality and dreadful toll of the so-called “ethnic penalty” levied on newer, foreign-origin claimants for jobs and positions.

The research said two-thirds of British Pakistani and Bangladeshi children remained static and at the same working class levels of their parents, thus languishing at the bottom of the UK’s social and economic mobility ladder.

The study, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and conducted by Essex University sociologist Dr Lucinda Platt, is considered one of the most comprehensive attempts to track ethnic minority “life chances” in the world of Western opportunity. Platt concluded that the differing levels of South Asian success makes for caution “in what we claim for ‘ethnicity’ and what we attribute to it”.

Platt said it was indisputable that British Indians were taking full advantage of the fact that an expansion in professional and managerial occupations over the past 30 years had created more “room at the top”. But she cautioned that the “welcome progress” of Indians and Afro-Caribbeans was “no cause for complacency (because) Britain is still a long way from being a meritocracy where social class plays no part in determining children’s chances of well-paid careers”.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1294956,curpg-1.cms