5.1 Putting It All Together
This chapter brings together the data collected for further analysis. Three main insights could be drawn.
Health and Food as Fun, Common Ground to Connect
The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey by Ford and Heath (2014) of the National Centre for Social Research showed that those with more “migrant friends (all of whom were more likely to have regular direct contact with migrants) had more positive than negative views about immigration’s effects” than those with lesser migrant friends.
The BSA survey also highlighted that Londoners had more positive views of immigrants than those outside London. These seemed to infer that London being a “melting pot” of ethnicities helped Londoners make more connections with immigrants and this was helpful in creating positive views. However the Social Integration Commission report (2015) challenged this notion with competing findings that Londoners’ social network was less representative of their community than those outside of London, indicating that Londoners were less socially integrated than they should have been. This showed that even in highly diverse areas, as in New York City, much work still needed to be done to promote social integration, and create opportunities for people to engage outside of their existing communities.
Based on interviews, immigrants and locals recognised that it would be useful for both to interact to cross-pollinate ideas and help one another. There were suggestions that it might be useful to establish a common goal for them to work towards, so that those who were coping fine within their own communities could see the value of reaching out to others as well.
During co-creation workshops, health and food were highlighted as common topics of interest to both immigrants and locals, and could be used as conduits to bring them closer together. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs supported these findings, as people needed to fulfil basic needs such as safety, and love/belonging. Even after the immigrants/locals had found their own communities, health and food were common needs to be fulfilled and activities around these could draw people to join. Incorporating the element of fun was also necessary to sustain engagement between immigrants and locals, as pointed out during the co-creation workshop. Therefore concepts surrounding health and food with an element of fun could be one way of promoting social integration.
Not Just About Older Locals
There were many research reports which singled out older locals for having anti-immigrant attitudes. The Brookings Institution (Winkler, 2015) reported that at least 40% of old natives opposed immigration. Older natives disproportionately opposed immigration, regardless of income, education and employment status.
Likewise the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey by Ford and Heath (2014) of the National Centre for Social Research indicated increasingly negative attitudes towards immigrant as age group of surveyees increased. For example, only 17% of those aged 70 and above considered immigrants to have made a positive impact on UK’s economy, compared with 36% among the 18–29 year-old age group; 53% of those aged 70 and above stated that there was a made a negative impact, compared with 40% per cent among the 18–29 age group.
Since BSA survey results indicated that those who were aged 70 and over tend to have the most negative views of immigrants, and those with the most negative view of immigrants tend to think that migrants came to claim benefits (Ford & Heath, 2014), the inductive argument was that older people tend to think that immigrants were fleecing the system.
During interviews and co-creation workshops, both immigrants and locals were aware that it was false that all immigrants could claim state benefits. They pointed that mass media had played a significant role in perpetuating the myth of immigrants enjoying state benefits at the expense of locals, and this made present-day people forget about past discriminations against their own ethnicities, and now commit the same act against others.
It was likely that people were pinpointing undocumented refugees for claiming state benefits unfairly. Yet such refugees made up just 4% of all immigrants in UK. Nonetheless the damage had been done, and many locals saw “immigrants” in general as thieves draining national coffers by claiming huge amounts of state benefits.
More importantly, interviewees and workshop participants mentioned that it would also be a fallacy to blame older locals for having such misconceptions about immigrants, and regard younger people as an overwhelming pro-immigrant group. As the BSA survey showed, significant numbers of young people also had similar misconceptions about immigrants. Therefore any design interventions will have to look into engaging the younger age groups too, and not simply focus on older locals only. I had overlooked this during the research phase, and so learnt something new.
Respect Language-Learning Immigrants
Locals also had language barriers with immigrants, which impeded the building of trust across communities. It was a candid response from locals who admitted that they had forgotten about how hard it was to pick up a new language. This dovetailed with a finding from my interviews that locals had forgotten about the past when their ethnicities was discriminated against — now many of them were discriminating against others instead. There needs to be respect for one another in order for relationships to grow.
Without strong English language skills, large numbers of economic immigrants and refugees could become concentrated in low-paid roles in sectors such as hospitality and cleaning, as reflected by accounts of Dominicans in New York City (Reynoso, 2003).
