Introduction: Immigration, Incorporation, Assimilation, and the Limits of Transnationalism

ELLIOTT R. BARKAN

ON JULY 5, 2005, four young men from Leeds, England, three of whom were born to middle-class Pakistani parents in Britain and the fourth from Jamaica, went to London and blew themselves up on three trains and a double-decker bus. Asked his reaction, a twenty-two-year-old Muslim in Leeds commented, "I don't approve of what [they] did, but I understand it. You get driven to something like this; it doesn't just happen." A few days later a New York Times reporter compared Muslim experiences in Leeds with those of Muslims in Jersey City, in the New York metropolitan region. In the former, extensive unemployment, lack of job skills, and uncompleted education both reflected and compounded the years of mistreatment of South Asians in this formerly quite homogeneous nation. The mistreatment had left many of these newcomers, and especially their English-born children, marginalized, frustrated, and, for some, sufficiently alienated to have become susceptible to radical Muslim terrorist appeals. Evidently, the processes of incorporation, whereby they might have been better integrated into mainstream English society, had eluded them.