STRANGERS IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY

...The Asians, unable to prevent what they regarded more as an invasion of their neighborhood than a demonstration, held a counterdemonstration in the course of which one participant was killed by police...

...they were white...

...It should have come as no surprise...

...Only one-third of the newcomers to Britain are, in fact, from former colonies among the less developed countries, but their numbers are viewed as overwhelming...

...A sense of vulnerability has led to the creation of community organizations and has simultaneously defined the limits of their efficacy...

...his tiger, along with his territory, passed into eager English hands...

...Distance between the two is being replaced by growing competition and tension...

...While Southall is generally less impoverished than Brick Lane, its economy is, nonetheless, a limited opportunity...

...Rather they should be directed against those who run the economy and control jobs and wages...

...The Huguenots sought refuge here in the Eighteenth Century...

...It was formed to resist the immigration and compel repatriation of those previously admitted, lest the purity of British stock be tainted...

...In Southall, the houses have been gaily painted by their proud owners, women in colorful saris parade down the sidewalks, cars pull up in a continuous stream to the shops along High Street, the street stalls, the record stores, and the cinemas...

...Inherited stereotypes have turned immigrants into scapegoats to obscure economic reality...

...The thoughts of English and Asian spectators must be very different as they gather around the glass cases, eyeing the colonial objects culled at a time when appropriation was an easier and more direct affair...

...they had migrated to East Africa to build the railroads, to South Africa (as well as the West Indies) to work the sugar plantations...

...The waiters stand outside the restaurants, chatting idly for lack of patrons...

...a larger Asian solidarity emerges only when the community is faced with an external threat...

...Unemployment in the areas has doubled in the past three years and is four times as high for blacks as for whites...

...Because England was more affluent and provided greater opportunity, Indians sought entrance there instead of returning to Asia...

...Now they, in turn, have been replaced by the Bengalis, and their synagogue has been transformed into a mosque...

...It is not a world in which an immigrant will be content to remain indefinitely...

...Pray God the British wake up' The National Front may be the British group most overtly opposed to the influx of immigrants from former colonies...

...The weathered signs casting shadows over the narrow streets testify to past presences from other places...

...For England's major political parties, linking immigration and race with economic ill health has proved an efficacious strategy...

...The African Asians had been encouraged to shift from one British possession to another to meet imperial economic requirements...

...Once in England, the Asians faced the economic options that usually confront immigrants: They could fill the jobs everyone else rejects, or they could try to create an alternative structure...

...The activities of the Front were an important element in the violent racial clashes of the 1970s...

...Poor conditions and poorer pay had driven English workers away...

...The immediate cause of the three-day riot that left 200 casualties was a Henny Sender wrote about India's colonial legacy in the April 1980 issue of The Progressive...

...it is viable only when cheap labor can be purchased to compete successfully with the textile trade in less developed countries...

...The sensitive issues of housing shortages, poor schools, and increased crime all are blamed on the newcomers...

...As their new homelands achieved independence, the Asians felt themselves threatened by African nationalism...

...To cater to the needs of the laborers, a small middle-class group migrated as well...

...they built a church and founded the textile trade...

...The British experience parallels the current situation of immigrants to the United States...

...Police Commissioner David McNee referred to "outside agitators," a claim outsiders as well as residents of Brixton dispute...

...Tippu Sultan was eventually killed fighting the British...

...Southall on a Sunday is much more colorful than Brick Lane...

...Last year, the National Front chose to march through Southall, much as the Nazis chose to march in Skokie...

...Even on a sunny day in Brick Lane, the overcoats are not discarded, for the only faces over the upturned collars belong to Asians still unaccustomed to the English climate...

...He sees oniy a homogeneous group of strangers to which he applies the blanket epithet "Paki...

...Although they provide Britain with indispensable services, they are regarded as parasites, and the cultures and traditions they bring with them are scorned as inferior...

...Southall, in the semi-industrial, semi-suburban outskirts of London, is populated, in contrast, mainly by middle-class Indians—Gujeratis and Punjabis...

...Brick Lane is an enclosed community in which the old feel safe and the young feel trapped...

...If there is community solidarity, it is purchased with the loss of class militancy...

...Distinctions of region and religion are still meaningful...

...Many letter writers pointed out that unemployment is higher in England's depressed industrial cities to the north and wondered whether there wasn't "a specifically ethnic factor which predisposes West Indian youth to reject authority...

...Immigrants with fewer options and lower expectations than their British counterparts will bend over sewing machines even on a bright Sunday afternoon...

...Even on a Sunday in Brick Lane there is a purposefulness in the atmosphere...

...Pray God the British wake up...

...The laws of uneven development invite migration from former colonies in the Third World to the industrially more advanced metropolitan countries...

...It is part of the irony of the colonial legacy that they identified more with the departing British than with their own origins...

...Two South Asian neighborhoods in London tell the story...

...Before the arrival of the Bengalis, the rag trade was in a state of decline...

...But how will an English shopkeeper feel when the grocery on the next corner passes into the hands of an Asian who will work late on weeknights and early on weekends...

...Less welcome than such souvenirs, but no less directly a consequence of British imperial activity, is the arrival in England of former colonial subjects from the West Indies and Asia...

...Front literature alleged that the immigrants contributed to violence in the streets, charged that race riots were hushed up by the "cosmopolitan cliques" controlling both government and the media, and worried about the end of Western civilization as a result of the immigrants' presence...

...But these sentiments, unfortunately, are not the sole property of the National Front and its predecessors on the far fringes of the British political spectrum...

...neither prosperity nor diversions are much in evidence...

...Some South Asian immigrants came to London directly from the subcontinent, while others come by way of Africa...

...Most activity is in the rooms behind the signs advertising the leather wholesaler, the textile dealer, and the sheepskin manufacturer...

...They also make it inevitable that Third World immigrants will form a labor pool at the lowest economic level in their new homelands...

...Meanwhile, the museums of London are crowded on Sundays...

...Given these conditions, it is remarkable that the clash was more between community and police than between black and white...

...In recent years, as the National Front has moved out of relative isolation and attempted to win support from the working class, its task has been facilitated by more subtle strands of racism woven through the fabric of Britain's "respectable" political groups...

...The violence that erupted in April in Brixton, a community in south London, was one of the worst clashes in Britain's history...

...There is only one cinema, with a rather shabby exterior, and only one travel agency offering cheap flights back to Asia...

...When the Asians are not locked into a limited and separate economy (as are the Cubans in Miami, for example), they are integrated into the larger economy at crucial points, either located at the bottom in the least remunerative positions or concentrated in such vital sectors as the National Health Service...

...The Asians did both...

...When a handle on the creature is turned, it growls fiercely while its mangled victim shrieks in agony...

...The reception that awaits Puerto Ricans...

...In the shadow of the renewed dockyards area of East London is Brick Lane, an impoverished district populated almost entirely by Bengalis who began settling there during World War II...

...But the choice was neither anticipated nor welcomed by the English...

...The shelves of local bookstores are stocked with the Koran, Hindu religious texts, and the Sikh holy book...

...Another recommended repatriation as "the only policy which gives any hope of avoiding yet more violent civil conflict...

...The television inside a kebab shop seems to be a voice from another planet...

...The textile industry requires little capital and much labor...

...The tiger was one of the favorite possessions of Tippu, Sultan of Mysore in South India at the end of the Eighteenth Century...

...While the Front does not have the support of the majority of white English citizens, there is general acceptance of the Conservative government's analysis that the immigrants contribute to Britain's problems...

...Our objections to immigration and multi-racialism spring from the fact that we seek to preserve the identity of the British nation...

...They are restless young men, indifferent to the call of the muezzin summoning the pious to prayer...

...They call it ethnic capitalism...

...Such perceptions are remnants of historic roles—products of imperialist strategies which shaped social organization and allocated economic functions on the basis of racial and communal categories...

...The division between colonizer and colonized continues even though the empire has been dissolved...

...Its founders proposed to revive the Commonwealth, albeit on new terms: It was to be composed of apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia and a white, economically self-sufficient Britain...

...Geographically and economically, they are no longer simply filling vacuums...

...The textile trade is now flourishing, but the inhabitants of Brick Lane have not reaped the benefits...

...while the political map has been redrawn since World War II, the economic world order preserves the old regime...

...Relative prosperity has failed to bring security to Southall...

...police anti-crime operation that had resulted in the harassment of hundreds of innocent people—most of them young West Indians...

...In fact, however, the Asian role in the economy is far from a negative one...

...There is a local Indian Workers Association, for example, but it is controlled largely by merchants...

...One hears Punjabi and Gujerati regional dialects as well as the standard Hindi of India and Pakistan's national language, Urdu...

...They come in response to the developed world's demand for labor—preferably cheap labor—and the treatment accorded them is shaped by the legacy of colonial attitudes and traditional roles...

...The average Briton does not make these distinctions, of course...

...By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the church had become a synagogue, and Jews plied the rag trade...

...Opinions will flower as wantonly as the cherries in my garden," one writer predicted in a letter to The Times of London...

...The tiger, intended to portend the defeat of the Westerners, instead became one of the objects of imperial acquisition cluttering the museums of Europe—a picturesque vestige of Empire...

...The few elderly in the immigrant community make relatively small claims on public health care, and Asians' need for housing is greatest in the inner city where demand by others is low...

...Nor do they absorb a disproportionate share of government spending on social services...

...A typical National Front publication described "a new menace to society, that of the half-caste offspring," warning, "Usually their victims were chosen for racial reasons, i.e...

...in New York or Mexicans in California bears a striking resemblance to that which awaits Asians in London...

...H.S...

...Southall reflects the creation of an independent sub-economy in which Asians provide goods and services to other Asians...

...This leaves the workers doubly victimized, first by paternalism in their own community and secondly by outside hostility...

...Unemployment, it is implied, is caused by newcomers taking the jobs of white Britons, while the welfare system is being crushed by the claims of unemployed immigrants...

...For the moment, immigrant Asians are frustrated by the extent to which their opportunities are constricted, while English workers are frustrated by reduced returns on their labor...

...In the short term, the interests of English and Asian workers seem antithetical, for their demands are directed against each other...

...The outsider, unable to account for the hostility, finds no further clues in the neighborhoods of either Brick Lane or Southall...

...The police were equally reluctant to believe that the grievances were justified...

...as English merchant marines were transferred to the Royal Navy, colonial sailors were recruited to replace them on the merchant ships...

...Asians are slowly beginning to move into less self-contained neighborhoods and less isolated economic sectors...

...Wrote member Martin Webster, "Racialism is the only scientific and logical basis for nationalism...

...If the British people are destroyed by racial interbreeding, the British nation will cease to exist...

...Strangers in the mother country The orphans of the British Empire Henny Sender Among the more bizarre masterpieces in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is Tippu's Tiger, "a life-sized beast of painted wood seen in the act of devouring a prostrate English soldier...

...The fact is that Brixton lies at the heart of the most crowded, pverpopu-lated borough of London...

...Both neighborhoods have been the scene of racial violence and confrontations organized by the National Front...

...The same inequitable pattern of economic development attracts Latin Americans to this country, condemns them to jobs others shun, and then exposes them to contempt for undertaking those functions...