Another alleged terrorist link to Pakistan draws attention to a busy path on the world’s migration map

The immigration superhighway

Pakistan and Britain - The immigration superhighway | Britain | The Economist

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IT IS midnight outside Mecca, and a crowd has gathered to pay homage. Their devotion is intense, but not religious: the “Mecca” in question is a bingo hall in Bradford, and the god being worshipped by a group of young, white Bradfordians appears to be alcohol. Nearby, in one of the city's Pakistani neighbourhoods, pubs have shut for lack of custom. Only a few streets away, it seems a continent apart.

One reason why shop signs on the streets of Bradford are still written in Urdu, half a century after the first Pakistanis came to Britain, is that population flows between the two countries remain large (see chart). Each year 250,000 Pakistanis come to Britain to visit, work or marry, and some 350,000 British citizens journey in the opposite direction, mainly to visit family. Links are reinforced by ingrained marriage customs: six of ten ethnic Pakistanis in Britain pick a spouse from Pakistan.

Those busy borders have been a boon in various ways. British universities rake in around £10,000 ($15,000) per person from their share of the 10,000 or so Pakistanis admitted each year on student visas, and businesses sponsor a couple of thousand Pakistani workers a year to plug gaps in the labour market. But the easy comings and goings between Britain and “the most dangerous place in the world”, as President Barack Obama recently dubbed Pakistan's western regions, is causing concern. On April 8th British police arrested 12 men on suspicion of involvement in what officers say was a “very, very big” terrorist plot. Ten were Pakistani citizens on student visas.

No one yet knows if the alleged plot was the real thing. Previous raids, hyped by the police before turning out to be false alarms, have instilled caution in a plot-weary public. But even if the photographs of shopping centres said to have been found at the men's addresses were holiday snaps rather than battle plans, the porous border between Britain and Pakistan is frequently abused. In December Gordon Brown said that three-quarters of domestic terrorist plots being monitored by MI5 had links to Pakistan. After the recent arrests the prime minister repeated that “Pakistan has got to do more to root out the terrorist elements in its country.”

This drew a scornful response from Pakistan's high commission in London, not least because the raids were compromised by a senior British policeman who clumsily flashed plans of the arrests to a bank of photographers, forcing the operation to be brought forward by a day. And not everyone in the government agrees that Islamic radicalism is the fault of Pakistan alone. Sadiq Khan, the minister for community cohesion, said that on a recent trip to Pakistan he had encountered anger at attacks by unmanned American drones. “The view they [students] had was that the UK was somehow responsible for this…They lumped us together with the US,” he said.

Wherever blame lies, in Britain more responsibility for the behaviour of visa-holders is being shifted on to the shoulders of those who sponsor them. Under rules that came in last month, employers and colleges must join an official register to sponsor work or student visas. The Home Office has reported that 460 of the 2,100 schools and colleges which sought to do so were rejected. Most universities support the change, since weeding out bogus colleges should benefit the rest.

Would-be terrorists will now have to scrape together the grades to get into a real college. That may not be too hard. But from the autumn the government wants universities to check up on suspicious behaviour, reporting foreign students who seem to have dropped out to the UK Borders Agency. Some lecturers, including those who work at a university raided on April 8th, are threatening a boycott.

The heaviest flows of human traffic between Britain and Pakistan, however, are within families. Ann Cryer, the MP for Keighley, a town near Bradford with a large Pakistani population, reckons that as many as 80% of Muslim marriages in the area are transcontinental. This may reflect a cultural preference but it is also “a way of getting around immigration controls”, Ms Cryer says. For a goatherd in Mirpur, “marrying a cousin in Keighley is a leg-up”. Elderly parents can be shipped over later.

Only a minority of these marriages are forced, most people agree. British-born men are willing to marry Pakistani girls to stay in their parents' good books; in any case, some carry on relationships with a local woman. British girls are less keen, but local Muslim men are in short supply owing to their own Pakistani marriages. Many people hotly dispute that there is a problem; Ms Cryer is angling for white votes, they say. On the contrary, she retorts, many of the loudest critics of such marriages are women whose foreign grooms filed for divorce once in Britain, often then bringing their real partners over from Pakistan.

Recent changes have tightened the conditions for marriage visas. Since November both partners have had to be 21 years old, up from 18 (and, a few years ago, 16). This will at least give British brides the chance to get the prerequisites for financial independence under their belts. The Home Office has said that it wants to require foreign spouses to speak English too. 

These measures may help to stop what appears to be an increasing trend. Alan Manning and Andreas Georgiadis of the London School of Economics crunched data to show that British-born Pakistanis, or those who immigrated as children, are more likely to have foreign spouses than those who came to Britain as adults. 

This startling fact may help to explain why Pakistanis (and Bangladeshis, who have similar marital habits) are failing to close the gap with other ethnic groups on female employment. Only a quarter of ethnic Pakistani women work, compared with 64% of Indians, for example. Mr Manning thinks something has to give: British women have greater earning power than their Pakistani husbands, which makes traditional roles in the home less plausible. In some cases, extremism may stem in part from male frustration that the old order is being subverted, he speculates.

For Ms Cryer, radicalisation is less important than the conditions in which many of her constituents live. “Parents who arrange marriages like these are holding the whole community back. They're not just importing cousins; they're importing poverty.” And that, in the long run, may prove a bigger Pakistani threat to Britain than extremism. 

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The immigration superhighway

Another alleged terrorist link to Pakistan draws attention to a busy path on the world’s migration map

Britain April 18th 2009

From the April 18th 2009 edition

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