"I have Hindu friends, Afro-Caribbean friends and now this Barber and I enjoy a good chat. When I was in BT, my regular Squash partner was a Sikh.
If we don't make the effort, then we will never know what we can achieve."
Your friends, Berbers and playmates are not the issue, Mikey. I'd imagine these people are mainly educated professionals or merchants. These two groups don't usually have much problem integrating. The problems of integration are the large enclaves of minority groups, many of whose members are poorly educated, in places like Bradford and Dewsbury. These can be viewed as alternative societies. The Muslim populations of these two towns originate mainly in the sub-continent - Pakistan, Kashmir and Gujerat in particular. Many of them will attend mosques teaching the fundamentalist Deobandi version of Islam (across the whole country I think this is about a third of all mosques). Many of these mosques will have been built with Saudi money and will have foreign-born imams leading prayer. In some of these enclaves 10% or more (almost certainly mainly women) will speak no English at all. Arranged marriage will be common; 70% of Bradford Muslims , for instance, are married to first cousins. The spouses will often be recruited from the "old country", so the traditional attitudes of the alternative society do not become diluted by acclimatisation, but are constantly being reinforced.
Now the Chuka Ummuna comment:
"... with too little attention paid to how we integrate people once they settle here."
Well, I don't know what "we" can do unilaterally to mend the "cracks in our communities". It seems to me that there's a necessary "they" part, don't you?