This paper subjects the criticisms advanced against multiculturalism to empirical test. It asks whether ethno-religious groups lead 'parallel lives' and, in consequence, fail to integrate with the wider society. It looks in particular at the alleged corrosive effects of multiculturalism, specifically at the maintenance of an ethnic rather than a British identity, social distance from white people and willingness to contemplate violent protest, but finds that all groups alike have displayed major change across the generations in the direction of a British identity and reduced social distance. It finds no evidence that rates of intergenerational change have been slower among ethno-religious groups that have made successful claims for cultural recognition. In contrast, lower levels of integration are associated with perceptions of individual or group discrimination.

Migrants and ethnic minorities in the UK are found to be disadvantaged in their access to work and earnings, but little is known about the characteristics of the jobs they occupy. This paper studies whether migrants and UK-born ethnic minorities attain similar jobs compared to their white British peers by clustering 17 indicators of job quality -covering intrinsic quality, work-life balance, monetary rewards, and employment conditions -into 5 latent classes. We find that non-white migrants are clustered in the worst jobs, while white migrants do relatively well. UK-born ethnic minorities are indeed less likely to work on the best jobs, but the type of disadvantage differs strongly between ethnic groups. Local deprivation drives some of the worse job quality of UK-born minorities while selection into lower-quality occupations and sectors drives much of the disadvantage of migrants. Coethnic support and particularly an economically stronger co-ethnic community in the locality can help shield ethnic minorities from the worst jobs, while ethnic niches in the occupation are associated with low-quality work. Finally, working in migrant-heavy occupations is associated with somewhat lower job quality; primarily affecting other migrants in a possible race to the bottom.

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Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies investigating the relationship between diversity and outcomes such as social cohesion and civic mindedness. This article addresses several common problems in this field and, using data for British neighbourhoods, elaborates on the experiences of both white British and ethnic minority respondents. We conclude that, if anything, diversity should be encouraged to cement the integration progress of migrants and foster stronger identification with Britain in the second generation. Deprivation at the neighbourhood level along with individual factors such as fear of crime is a much stronger predictor of deterioration of the civic spirit than diversity. Bridging contacts have the expected strong positive association with cohesion outcomes; and contrary to policy concerns no strong negative impact is observed for associational bonding among minority ingroupers.

The article focuses on transitions between employment and not working among immigrants, the second generation and British-born Whites. We find evidence of lower stability in employment for New Commonwealth, Middle Eastern and Turkish immigrants. This penalization holds also for the second generation, especially in terms of exiting unemployment. On the other hand, no disadvantage is noted for labour immigrants from countries recently accessed to the EU such as Romanians and Bulgarians; or, if penalization is observed in the transition matrices, it disappears with controls for personal and labour market characteristics as is the case for EU8 and Eastern European immigrants. The continuous penalization of immigrants in Britain is confirmed; however, a dynamic perspective emphasizes that some immigrants, such as those from Eastern Europe, are less penalized than is observed in cross-sectional analyses.