Blending in Britain

In her Thursday article, Daphne Caruana Galizia takes a cue from the veil controversy in the UK to discuss issues of Maltese migration:

..Success is dependent on complete integration into the host society. That’s why Maltese immigrants tend to do astoundingly well in Britain but less well in Australia, Canada and the USA, where they herd together and try to recreate Maltese life and mores in an alien culture. The Maltese who emigrate to England – and most of them end up there, rather than in other parts of Britain – become more English than the English. A Maltese working-class family will morph, within the space of one generation, into a Liverpudlian or Manchurian working-class family, complete with authentic accent, attitude and habits.

Higher up the social scale, the Maltese émigrés will turn into something plucked from A Passage to India, reinterpreted in 21st-century clothes, clipping their vowels like the Queen and walking around like Prince Charles. Let’s not be mean to them, though, for they have discovered the truth of the ages-old recipe for successful survival: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. The saying is supposed to be a contraction of some advice given to (Saint) Augustine by (Saint) Ambrose: “Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi” (when you are in Rome, live the Roman way; when you are elsewhere, live as they do there.”

This is what the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has to say about Maltese emigrants to Britain, in his book Millennium: “The Maltese and Montserratian communities show the range of adaptive strategies. The tiny island of Montserrat sent more people over in the 1950s and 1960s, proportionately speaking, than any other West Indian island, driven by the collapse of the island’s sugar industry in 1952. There are fewer than 5,000 of them but they stick together. They marry each other. They settle together in spots like Long Ground in Birmingham, named after a village in Montserrat, or worship together in Pentecostal churches in Stoke Newington. They share business, form rotating credit associations, exchange visits – called “passing” – at Christmas and are tied to home by remittances and the fear of expulsion. The Maltese, by contrast – of whom there are 30,000 permanently in Britain by a common estimate – migrate singly and live dispersed. They blend into the British background – often in conscious flight from an identity besmirched by the stereotype of the vicious ponce, the evil reputation of allegedly Maltese gang leaders who practised the “unEnglish crime” of pimping in the 1950s. The difference between the Montserratians and Maltese is not to be explained by the colour of their skins. Cypriots are keen to cocoon themselves in their own culture; Ugandan Asians to forego theirs.”...