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SUPERDIVERSITY
Superdiversity explores processes of diversication and the complex, emergent social
congurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the
world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in
social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena but also in the ways that these
phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status.
The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social
sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversi-
cation. Central to this eld is the relationship between social categorization and
social organization, including stratication and inequality. Increasingly complex
categories of social “dierence” have signicant impacts across scales, from
entire societies to individual identities. While diversication is often met with
simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, super-
diversity encourages a perspective on dierence as comprising multiple social
processes, exible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group iden-
tities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of
social categories as multidimensional, unxed, and porous as opposed to views
based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversication and
increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of
climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migra-
tion, social relations, and inequalities.
Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations
created by changing migration patterns and calls for a rethinking of public policy
and social scientic approaches to social dierence. This introduction to the multi-
disciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students
and researchers in a range of elds in the humanities and social sciences.
Steven Vertovec is Founding Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study
of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. Previously, he was Pro-
fessor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Director of
the British Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre on Migration, Policy
and Society (COMPAS). He is the author of Transnationalism (Routledge, 2009),
The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns (Routledge, 2000), and Hindu Trinidad:
Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-economic Change (Palgrave, 1992) and co-author of
Diversity and Contact: Immigration and Social Interaction in German Cities (Palgrave,
2016). He is also editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, including Conceiving
Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2003), The Multiculturalism Backlash
(Routledge, 2010), Routledge International Handbook of Diversity Studies (Routledge,
2015), Diversities Old and New (Palgrave, 2015), and The Oxford Handbook of Super-
diversity (Oxford University Press, 2022).
“In Superdiversity, Steven Vertovec provides a tour de force elucidation of
the concept he introduced in 2007, explaining that superdiversity entails
much more than rising ethnic heterogeneity tied to immigration, but is
instead rooted in a deeper complexication of human society wherein
social categories are recongured to be multiple, exible, and porous
rather than static and xed, yielding increasingly complex identities that
social scientists and policy makers must recognize and accept.”
Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology
and Public Aairs, Princeton University, USA
“Steven Vertovec’s concept of ‘superdiversity’ is widely used across the
social sciences for understanding social change. In this ambitious and most
informative new book, the author species and updates his theory; responds
to his critics; creates bridges with the interdisciplinary literatures on cat-
egorization, identity, and boundaries; and analyzes all we know about the
responses and backlash to diversication. For all these reasons, this book
is sure to be a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in immigration, diversity,
cosmopolitanism, racism, inequality, and related topics. I recommend it
with much enthusiasm.”
Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies
and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies,
Harvard University, USA
“A masterly account that takes us from the development of the superdi-
versity concept and its use in the social sciences to public responses to
diversication. Vertovec’s well-written and insightful book is a must read
for students and scholars who hope to understand changes in the nature of
diversity in today’s world.”
Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology,
Hunter College and Graduate Center,
City University of New York, USA
“Superdiversity is now a key concept in research on cultural complexity. In
this excellent, eagerly anticipated book, its originator explains and explores
the implications of the current ‘diversication of diversity’, showing why
diversity cannot be reduced to simple categories. Itdeserves to be read by
everyone trying to make sense of the complex social realities of the con-
temporary world.”
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology,
University of Oslo, Norway
Steven Vertovec
SUPERDIVERSITY
Migration and Social Complexity
Designed cover image: Flickr (Chris Yates Studios)
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Steven Vertovec
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been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Br itish Library
ISBN: 978-0-415-83462-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-83463-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-50357-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780203503577
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To Lia
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations x
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 18
3 The Many Meanings of Superdiversity 48
4 Diversifications 87
5 Responses to Diversification 121
6 Social Complexity 159
7 Conclusion 201
Index 229
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
2.1 Net international migration to Britain by citizenship 23
2.2 Newham (total; population 243,898) by country/
region of birth 25
2.3 Local authorities by non-UK region of birth (with
total foreign-born percent of local population) 26
3.1 A typology of articles referring to superdiversity,
2008–2014: number of articles by discipline/
field and type 60
Tables
2.1 Foreign nationals living in the UK, largest
twenty-fivegroups, 2004 23
2.2 Number of people living in London by Country of Birth
outside the UK, largest twenty-five groups, 2001 24
2.3 Estimated number of speakers of top 20 languages
in London, 2000 27
2.4 Applications received for asylum in the United Kingdom
1994–2003, selected nationalities 30
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is long overdue, literally and guratively. I was originally supposed to
deliver the book manuscript to Routledge in 2015 but was unable to accomplish
this due to a family tragedy. This knocked me o my feet for a long while. By
the time I was able to pick up the book project once more, managerial duties
and a barrage of other responsibilities and commitments always kept research
and writing slow. Only with the Covid pandemic, it seems, did some space/time
open up and allow me to get back to writing this. In the meantime, as the inter-
vening years passed, my own thoughts on superdiversity, migration, and social
complexity developed – not least stimulated by the discussions and work carried
on at our Max Planck Institute. In this way, the book is overdue in terms of a
device to express the development of my own thoughts on the topic as well as
the development of the concept in the public and academic spheres where it has
taken on a life of its own.
Across more than 15 years, from when I rst cooked up the concept till now as
I seek to embellish it, I have received help, feedback, criticism, and advice from a
very wide set of people. Concerning the original work leading to the 2007 article
in Ethnic and Racial Studies which really launched the concept into the academic
sphere, I gained from important comments particularly from Robin Cohen,
Alisdair Rogers, Susanne Wessendorf, Andreas Wimmer, Gerd Baumann, Danny
Sriskandarajah, Sarah Kyambi, Dan Hiebert, David Ley, and the sta and students of
the ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University
of Oxford. There, Alessio Cangiano also gave me special help with data. A joint
fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and Social
Science Research Council (USA) also importantly supported this work. I also gained
much from discussions with participants in seminars at Harvard University and the
University of British Columbia, and at conferences of the Swedish Anthropological
Association and European Association of Social Anthropologists.
xii Acknowledgements
Since then, work leading up to this book has been bolstered by the help
of excellent research assistants at the Max Planck Institute, especially Wiebke
Unger, Margherita Cusmano, Zeynep Bozkurt, and Carolina Reiners. As with
practically everything around my directorship and work, Jutta Esser has been
at the centre, keeping it all together. Chris Kofri has undertaken an essential
set of support tasks necessary to make the publication happen. Other Institute
colleagues who have played important roles in helping me with research are
Simone Dietrich, Renate Hägele, Ulrike Koecher, Norbert Winnige, Birgitt
Sippel, Rami Higazi, and Alexei Matveev. A changing, but ever-intellectually
dynamic and extremely interesting team of PhD students and postdocs at the
Institute – who have gladly never been shy to criticize their boss! – have contin-
uously stimulated my thoughts and kept me on my argumentative toes.
While of course I am solely responsible for the ideas, analyses, interpre-
tations, and their possible aws throughout this work, I have been fortu-
nate to be enormously inuenced by large number of outstanding thinkers.
This commenced while I was a student at various stages, with inspiration
and guidance by my mentors David Carrasco, Ninian Smart, and J. Clyde
Mitchell. As a young scholar and through the present, I have especially valued
the feedback, ideas, and views of my friend and occasional co-author Robin
Cohen. During my Oxford years when the superdiversity concept was taking
shape, I was fortunate to be surrounded by extremely knowledgeable experts
who greatly inuenced my thought, particularly Stephen Castles, Bridget
Anderson, Nick Van Hear, and Sarah Spencer. Since commencing my posi-
tion at the Max Planck Institute, I have benetted enormously from a special
set of scholarly friends to whom I have regularly and happily returned (in
idyllic gatherings at Harnack House Berlin and Schloss Ringberg, Bavaria) to
gather their views. This includes Ralph Grillo, Mary Waters, Phil Kasinitz,
Nancy Foner, Dan Hiebert, Brenda Yeoh, Karen Schoenwaelder, Loren
Landau, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Marco Martiniello, and the late, great
Jan Blommaert. Other close colleagues who have helped me shape ideas
include Nando Sigona, Jenny Phillimore, Peter Scholten, Miles Hewstone,
Ewa Morawska, Douglas Massey, Rogers Brubaker, Andreas Wimmer,
Michèle Lamont, Paul Spoonley, Boris Nieswand, Matthias Koenig, Rainer
Bauböck, Thomas Faist, Virginie Guiraudon, Ajay Gandhi, Phil Gorski, John
Solomos, Jeremy Walton, Lucas Drouhot, Maria Schiller, Georg Diez, and
Van Tran. Just as importantly, Ihave greatly benetted from the ongoing
work and thoughts of outstanding former students, especially Fran Meissner,
Alan Gamlen, Susanne Wessendorf, Tilmann Heil, and Sakura Yamamura.
At Routledge, Chris Parry, Rebecca Brennan, Diana Ciobotea, and Alyson
Claey have importantly helped bring this publication to fruition.
Part of the work that went into this book was supported by an Advanced
Investigator Grant (269784) from the European Research Council. Supportive
work environments and stimulating discussions with students and colleagues on
relevant themes took place in seminars at the Max Planck Institute, Autonomous
Acknowledgements xiii
University Barcelona, University of Tübingen, University of Göttingen, and
during my visiting professorships in recent years at Erasmus University Rot-
terdam and Monash University.
Materials have been reproduced or drawn from a number of my previous pub-
lications, especially: Chapter 2 – Vertovec (2007); Chapter 3 – Vertovec (2019);
Chapter 4 – Vertovec (2012, 2017, 2018, 2020a); Chapter 5 – Vertovec (2019);
Chapter 6 – Vertovec (2021); and Chapter 7 – Vertovec (2020a, 2020b).
References
Vertovec, S. 2007. “Super-diversity and its implications,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6):
1024–54 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465
Vertovec, S. 2012. “‘Diversity’ a nd the social i maginar y,” Archives Européennes de S ociologie/
European Journal of Sociology 53(3): 287–312 https://doi.org/10.1017/s000397561200015x
Vertovec, S. 2017. “Mooring, migration milieus and complex explanation,” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 40(9): 1574–81 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1308534
Vertovec, S. 2018. “What’s the matter with Rotterdam?” in Coming to Terms with
Superdiversity, P. Scholten and M. Crul (eds.), Cham: Springer, pp. 337–44 https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-3-319-96041-8_13
Vertovec, S. 2019. “Talking around super-diversity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42: 125–39
https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1406128
Vertovec, S. 2020a. “Afterword: “The work of ‘integration’,” in Digesting Dierence,
K. McKowen and J. Borneman (eds.), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 251–66 h t t p s : //
doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_12
Vertovec, S. 2020b. “Low-skilled migrants after Covid19: Singapore futures?” COMPAS
Coronavirus and Mobility Forum blog, https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2020/low-
skilled-migrants-after-covid-19-singapore-futures/
Vertovec, S. 2021. “The social organization of dierence,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44(8):
1273–95 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1884733
DOI: 10.4324/9780203503577-1
1
INTRODUCTION
In 1985, the inuential American anthropologist Cliord Geertz delivered one
of the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The purpose of his lecture,
entitled “The Uses of Diversity,” was to address not just certain globally chang-
ing empirical conditions, but also the ways that those conditions are conceived.
The set of changes that Geertz described was that the world was increasingly
becoming more connected and more mobile (still a rather novel notion in the
1980s), and hence “cultures” could not be situated in specic places (if they
ever could be). Another, related point of his lecture was that any idea of social
dierence that was based on xed and bounded identity categories was changing
too. Geertz emphasized that these trends do not stop people from ill-treating
others based on ethnocentrism and crude stereotypes. What’s needed in light of
these matters, he urged, is a conceptual re-orientation to social dierence that
might, quite literally and thoroughly, change our minds. “It is in this,” Geertz
(1986: 274) said, “strengthening the power of our imaginations to grasp what is
in front of us, that the uses of diversity, and of the study of diversity, lie.”
The global trends that Geertz spoke of in the 1980s have continued through
the present day, albeit with dierent speeds, shapes, factors and outcomes from
placeto place. Societies around the world are diversifying profoundly. This takes
many forms, manners, and courses – indeed, we might best talk of many
overlapping, entangled and mutually determining diversications – from the
skewed globalization of neoliberal practices and spread of consumer goods, popular
media, and modes of communication, through the diusion of ideas, policies and
social movements, to the multiplication of lifestyles, family structures, identities,
moral codes, and social practices. Global migration is a key component of diversi-
cation processes. Most obviously, this is because migrants tend to bring newness
to their societies of arrival, inuencing the nature of social categories such as race,
ethnicity and nationality, contributing to the corpus of cultural forms including
2 Introduction
styles, cuisines, and artistic expressions, expanding sets of linguistic and semiotic
practices, enlarging the array and expressions of religious traditions, and extend-
ing or initiating social and political initiatives. Diversication is also inherently
bound up with many kinds of inequalities, too. Who or what changes by way of
diversication is both determined by and a determinant of patterns of social strat-
ication. Diversication is thus one of the foremost social processes of our age.
As we consider the future, impacted profoundly by climate change, it is clear that
diversication will continue to shape societies the world over – again in uneven
and unfair ways as some people, depending on their combination of characteris-
tics, will suer climate impacts far more than others.
Superdiversity is a concept coined to convey the multidimensional nature of
diversication processes and how these condition social patterns and stratica-
tion. It was conceived by me, and is still largely invoked by others, as a way to
think about and approach research concerning contemporary migration pro-
cesses and outcomes. The concept of superdiversity also oers a way to consider
other concurrent modes of diversication. Superdiversity and diversication are
notions pointing to the ongoing creation of ever more complex societies. What
is considered in the idea of superdiversity, what is entailed in processes of diversi-
cation, and how can we understand the rise of new forms of social complexity?
These are among the main questions engaged by this book.
What’s at stake?
Diversication entails a fundamental mode of social transformation. With this
statement, I draw upon important academic works on the idea of social
transformation to indicate a kind and degree of change that cuts across economic,
political, social and cultural terrains as well as macro- to micro-scales (see
Smelser 1998; Wiltshire 2001; Castles 2001, 2010; Rosenau 2003). When we
speak of social transformation, we are talking about extensive shifts in the ways
societies are organized and in the ways we think about them. As societies diver-
sify across a range of scales, from the national, urban, and neighbourhood to the
classroom, workplace and local park, inherent features of the social are subject
to change. This includes the ways we conceptually categorize one another, the
attitudes we have towards those deemed however “dierent,” the interactions
and practices that arise or are reproduced by encounters with others, and the
social positions or statuses that both underpin and develop out of all of these.
Diversication and evolving dynamics of diversity aect changes at the core of
social structure and social relations. For these reasons, following Geertz, the study
of diversication and diversity must be one of the most fundamental areas of social
science inquiry. It involves the attempt to understand how we live, how we can
live and how we are going to live together as intrinsically distinctive people.
The study of diversication and diversity itself is certainly not new, nor of course
is the phenomenon of highly diverse societies. Since ancient times, most societies
and certainly empires in the past were highly diverse linguistically, religiously, and
Introduction 3
in terms of what we now describe as ethnicity (see among others, Grillo 1998,
Greatrex and Mitchell 2000; Hoerder 2002; Heather 2010; McInerney 2014;
Blanton 2015; Vertovec 2015). The distinguished historian William McNeill (1986)
famously asserted that “polyethnicity” was the condition describing practically all
societies throughout history. Further, he noted, the idea of societies being actually
or ideally “homogeneous” (ethnically and racially, linguistically and religiously)
was something that arose as a kind of historical aberration, based on modernist
nation-building pursuits especially in Western Europe since about 1750. However,
such a presumption of homogeneity-as-norm and diversity-as-exception has long
shaped not only national narratives and policies, but social scientic paradigms as
well (coinciding with the “container model” of nation states upon which “meth-
odological nationalism” is based; cf. Beck 2000, 2002, 2004; Wimmer and Glick
Schiller 2002). Accordingly, we have had numerous sociological studies of what
diversity, arguably seen as a deviation from an ideal state, “does” to societies. This
includes well known (and criticized) studies of diversity as: a threat to social cohe-
sion (Putnam 2007), a hindrance to political and economic development (Alesina
and Ferrara 2005), or a signicant if not problematic factor in the redistribution
of public goods (Singh and Vom Hau 2016). This is countered by more positive
views, still based on a kind of diversity-as-exception premise, such as that the
introduction of diversity is a key to stimulating creativity and innovation in urban
settings (Florida 2002) and similarly to building more eective, problem-solving
management teams (Page 2007). For a long time – but seemingly exacerbated
more recently – the belief that diversication is a threat to homogeneous nation-
states underlays much right-wing nationalism as well.
While few societies have actually ever been “homogeneous,” the idea of the
homogeneous nation has without a doubt played a central role in creating hier-
archical social structures and systems of inequality, greatly aecting those who
have been categorized as outside the homogenous norm. Thus, it also provides
the basis of most national discourses and policies concerning social “integra-
tion” (Favell 2022). This is a key reason why it is essential to consider dynamics
of social categorization when seeking to understand how societies (again, right
down to micro-scales) are organized and reproduced. It is particularly essential
during times, such as the present, when diversications of many kinds are pro-
ceeding, if not increasing, apace.
For some years at the University of Oxford, I taught a postgraduate course
on the Anthropology of Cultural Complexity. This included critical reviews
of thinking about historical and cross-cultural forms of social organization,
through to considering what phenomena and processes are at play in so-called
plural societies, border cultures, syncretism and creolization, global-local rela-
tions, diasporas and transnationalism. As my students and I examined a wide
assortment of relevant literature, it became clearer each term that whatever we
consider to be social and cultural complexity entails not just structures of power
and sets of social relations, but inherently the ways people construct and imple-
ment conceptions about the nature of groups and identities. It is both social
4 Introduction
organization and social categories that combine to produce ever more complex
social dynamics, as well as modes of stratication. This view runs through the
book and is the focus of theoretical development in the last chapters.
Once again, now is a vital time to study diversication and forms of diversity.
In the 21st century, “The world is much more diverse on multiple dimensions
and at many levels, typied by the salience of dierences and their dynamic
intersections” (Jones and Dovidio 2018: 45). The reasons for this are numerous,
including the facts that:
worldwide, societies are diversifying – ethnically/racially, linguistically,
religiously, and along several other characteristics – considerably through
migration;
in many countries, even apart from migration, populations are also diversi-
fying through natural demographic growth within a range of existing cat-
egories, along with a marked rise in the number of people identifying with
“mixed” backgrounds;
there is more evidence and public concern about growing social and economic
inequalities – disparities surrounding resources, opportunities, material out-
comes, representation and relative social status – and the ways in which these
are disproportionately distributed in relation to categories of social “dierence”;
rapid diversication is known to stimulate support for populist right-wing
parties, while signicantly at the same time, as measured in academic studies
and public opinion surveys, pro-diversity attitudes remain high and stable.
Such divergent trends and patterns of attitudes contribute to growing social
and political fragmentation of societies; and
while an escalating number of cities around the world are becoming what
some, correctly or incorrectly, term “majority-minority,” everyday urban
exposure to complex forms of diversity is now often considered common-
place or “normal.”
Superdiversity is a concept oered to stimulate an understanding of the intersec-
tion of multiple characteristics that comprise contemporary processes of diversi-
cation. With new modalities, permutations and eects of diversication, new
concepts can serve to help academics, policymakers, practitioners and the general
public gain better and more productive grasps of what’s happening around them.
In this way, the concept arose as a proposed corrective to existing concepts, and
one more tting to a changing reality.
The superdiversity concept
Multiculturalism, interculturalism, and “diversity” itself, as a normative concept
and policy term, have been notions in play across the public sphere for many
years. They have done much work, not least by way of providing a view onto
the representation of “dierence” in society. Further, these terms have been
Introduction 5
operationalized in social policies and institutional practices to variable eect.
Inherent to each – or at least within prominent interpretations of each – is a kind
of premise that social dierence is something that can or should be “managed,”
usually from the top down (i.e., arranged by a state agency or public organiza-
tion). A common critique follows, namely that each of these terms tends to be
based on, or at least replicate, a rather at, homogenizing or unidimensional view
of dierence: that is, that every person belongs to one or another group that can
be represented by the presence of a single individual in an organization or activ-
ity. This is well encapsulated in the critical words of one British civil servant,
who said: “If you think that adding me to your Board creates diversity, you’d be
wrong. I am middle aged, in senior management and Oxbridge educated. The
fact that I am Asian does not make any dierence. On a charity Board I am just
more of the same” (in Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010: 25). Such approaches
to dierence may tend to equalize categories: race is treated as equivalent to
gender which is equivalent to sexuality or disability, etc. Questions of dissim-
ilar social positions and power relations might also often be sidelined in these
approaches to dierence as well. Debates over the pros and cons of multicultural-
ism, interculturalism, and “diversity” very much continue in both academic and
institutional domains (see for instance, Vertovec 2012; Meer et al. 2016; Grillo
2018; Carlsson and Pijpers 2021; Loh 2022).
In fundamental ways, the concept of superdiversity arose as a critique of
British multiculturalism specically. For many years before I developed the
superdiversity concept, I had written about a range of problems associated with
notions of multiculturalism (including Vertovec 1996, 1998). These critiques
resonated with those of many colleagues at the time, who also thought that mul-
ticulturalist frameworks tended to foster rather staid, essentialist and bounded
ideas of ethnic groups and cultures, created a kind of internal colonialism if
not system inter-ethnic competition, and didn’t adequately address inequality.
Moreover, multiculturalist views of British society completely ignored real
changes that were taking place regarding new, non-British populations. That is,
British public discussions of multiculturalism centred almost entirely on Asian
(here, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) and West Indian (largely Jamaican but
also Trinidadian, Barbadian, Guyanese and other small Caribbean) categories.
For decades these categories certainly pertained to the largest segments of post-
migration populations. However, by the early 2000s, signicant changes to
migration and population were underway.
An important stimulus for developing the superdiversity concept came when
I saw a small graphic in The Economist in the early 2000s. This depicted migrant
inows to the UK between 1993 and 2002 by way of the broad country of origin
categories of: UK (for return migrants), EU (essentially free movement of work-
ers), Old Commonwealth (particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand),
New Commonwealth (countries that became independent after WWII, espe-
cially India, Pakistan and several Caribbean nations), and “Other” (residually
relating to the rest of the world). From the 1950s to 1970s, immigration to
6 Introduction
Britain was dominated by New Commonwealth origin; thereafter, most immi-
gration in this category has been by way of family reunication channels. The
Economist graphic depicted relatively stable and equivalent numbers in the early
to mid-1990s, specically 20–30,000 people per year arriving in each cate-
gory. But from around 1997, the “Other” category grew massively, amounting
to some 200,000 immigrants by 2002. It was clear to me that the conven-
tional understanding of British social diversity needed to be re-addressed. I was
intrigued, and sought to research the questions: who are these “Other,” what
is shaping their migration, what are their characteristics, what are the eects of
this migration shift on British society, and how might it challenge the way that
migrants and ethnicity are conceived? This research entailed the data presented
in a Working Paper (Vertovec 2006), which led eventually to a journal article
(Vertovec 2007, reproduced here as Chapter 2).
Boiled down to its basics, the concept of superdiversity provides a way to
think about multidimensionality or intersectionality with regard to new pat-
terns of migration. Firstly, I point to increasing movements of people from
more varied backgrounds represented by more dierentiated categories. Not
only are there more, smaller cohorts of people from a wider range of origin
countries, but I point to shifting ows of people with wide-ranging nation-
alities, ethnicities, languages, religions, gender balances, age ratios, human
capital, transnational practices and, especially, migration channels and legal
statuses. Secondly, I emphasize the shifting combinations of these backgrounds
and categories, such that entire cohorts of migrants become characterized by
particular intersections. Examples include the fact that (at the time of writing
the 2007 article) 71% of Filipinos in the UK were young women with visas to
work in the health service, while 71% of Algerians were older males who were
mostly asylum-seekers prohibited from working. The inadequacy of thinking
of multiculturalism and diversity solely in terms of ethnic groups seemed clear.
One of the main reasons for stressing a multidimensional approach has been
to stress that dierence and diversity needs to be understood via “a dynamic
interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered,
multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically dierentiated
and legally stratied immigrants” (Vertovec 2007: 1024)
The concept of superdiversity was created for purposes of denoting these
kinds of important shifts in migration patterns and social outcomes. In itself it
does not oer explanations for why these have occurred, but rather prompts the
quest for explanations (see Chapter 3). As I have written elsewhere:
I must rst stress that super-diversity is not a theory. I regard theory as
providing an account of how-things-work (inherent relations or causali-
ties). Nor is it a hypothesis (or to-be-tested theory). As its author (Vertovec
2007), I always intended super-diversity to be rst and foremost a descrip-
tive concept, constructed for a special purpose in order to tie together a
set of observed, co-occurring phenomena that supersede phenomena that
Introduction 7
were previously evident (hence the “super-” prex). For this purpose,
super-diversity was coined to draw attention to complex – and arguably
new – patterns in migration phenomena over the past three decades or so.
Vertovec (2017: 1575)
The multidimensional aspect is crucial, not least to avoid a misunderstanding
that has often subsequently arisen. That is, superdiversity does not suggest a kind
of threshold. I have often been asked, “At what point does diversity become
superdiversity?” As I describe in Chapter 3, many people have simply assumed
that superdiversity merely means “more ethnicity” within a national or urban
population. This misconstrual is what Ralph Grillo (2015) calls “Superdiversity
Lite.” It is in contrast to “Superdiversity Heavy,” which is the original mean-
ing relating to new, complex congurations of multiple categories concerning
migrants. So the diversity-superdiversity distinction is not a matter of quantity,
but of the co-occurrence and mutual inuence of a number of classications.
Following the growing interest in superdiversity, at least one similar notion
has been proposed by scholars, that is “hyperdiversity.” This was the central
organizing concept for the EU-funded DiverCities project, initiated by the
late Ronald van Kempen, which explored ways that urban diversity can be
harnessed as an asset to foster social cohesion and economic development. The
project team engaged the concept of superdiversity and used it as a spring-
board for their work (Oosterlynck et al. 2019). In order to shift attention
from superdiversity’s concern with migration-driven diversication, they
proposed the term “hyper-diversity” to describe urban developments not just
with respect to ethnicity, but also in terms of general social lifestyles, attitudes
and activities (Taşan-Kok et al. 2017). The project was certainly interesting
and produced many valuable ndings. However, I remain sceptical of their
central concept. This scepticism (not solely of the DiverCities project, but
also towards others who have talked of “hyperdiversity”) was voiced by Fran
Meissner and me in this way:
In some spheres, commentators speak of the growth of “hyperdiversity”
(or use this term interchangeably with super-diversity). We suggest that
this is not helpful for two reasons. The rst is that hyperdiversity tends to
convey the idea that we are merely faced with “more diversity” in terms
of ethnicity. This is a unidimensional model that misses the main point
argued by super-diversity (again, that several dimensions of migration
ows have been changing at once). The second reason why hyperdiver-
sity is an unfortunate term is that “hyper-” can inherently suggest that
something is overexcited, out of control and therefore generally negative
or undesirable (like hyperactivity or hyperination). Again, “super-” is
our preferred modier in order to emphasize the sense of superseding, or
addressing what is “above and beyond” what was previously there.
Meissner and Vertovec (2015: 5)
8 Introduction
Thus, while I continue to somewhat distance myself from “hyperdiversity”
and remain grounded in superdiversity as a core concept and approach, I do
share with the DiverCities team a common concern. That is, we need to rec-
ognize that all people do not have a single identity but belong to diverse cate-
gories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other axes of
identity, all of which intersect and interact in a variety of ways and with various
eects. Such a common perspective is part of what we might call the “long arm
of anti-essentialism.”
Having spent my post-doctoral and early career in the UK during the 1990s
and early 2000s, I was steeped in an intellectual environment dominated by
numerous concepts and approaches to migration and social dierence that –
especially looking back – all inherently shared a methodology based in anti-
essentialism. Essentialism was the term (which sometimes turned into a kind of
swearword or internecine accusation; see Grillo 1998: 195–200) with reference
to depictions of any social category as having hard boundaries and an unchang-
ing, ontological quality or trait – an essence – shared by all deemed to be within
it (see Sayer 1997). Critiques of essentialist notions, particularly gender-based,
were central in much feminist theory at the time (e.g., Witt 1995; Grillo 1995;
also see Mikkola 2017). Anti-essentialism, as a stance against simplistic and unidi-
mensional views of social categories, is inherent to numerous other key concepts
that have been developed since the 1990s, including: intersectionality (Crenshaw
1991); segmented assimilation (Portes and Zhou 1993); ethnic options (Waters
1990); postethnicity (Hollinger 1995); hyphenated identities (e.g., Verkuyten
2004); creolization (e.g., Hannerz 1987); hybridity (e.g., Werbner and Modood
1997); Third Space (Bhabha 1994); between two cultures (e.g., Watson 1997);
biculturalism or dual identity (e.g., Yamada and Singelis 1999); multiculture
(e.g., Gilroy 1993); bright versus blurred social boundaries (Alba 2005); trans-
nationalism (e.g., Glick Schiller et al. 1992); diasporas (e.g., Cohen 1997); and
cosmopolitanism (e.g., Vertovec and Cohen 2002). All of these are important
forerunners, if not direct stimuli, of the concept of superdiversity. That is, like
these coevolving concepts, superdiversity is also built on the perspective that no
single category is so bounded and ontological, and that it is not one, but a conu-
ence of several open and ever-changing categories that matters most to people’s
lives, their social positions and the social structures around them.
These antecedent, anti-essential concepts helped me in thinking through the
changes to global migration ows mentioned earlier. Yet somehow none of them
was describing exactly what I wanted to put my nger on. I wanted to acknowl-
edge their insights, but still point to the kinds of transformations that I was see-
ing in and through the British migration data. I wanted to capture, especially,
both an intersectionality of categories (specically concerning migration, not
solely the categories of gender-race-class with which much of the existing litera-
ture dealt) and new congurations of features surrounding migrant populations.
Superdiversity was coined as a way to capture these processes and phenomena in
an attempt to contribute to the corpus of social scientic concepts and literature.
Introduction 9
The substantial social scientic interest in the concept has not been entirely
surprising (while some of its interpretations certainly have been; see Chapter 3).
The more we have moved into the 21st Century, the more have scholars observed
complexifying trends and searched for ways to describe and theorize them. This
was meaningfully pointed out by the late, prominent German sociologist Ulrich
Beck. He (2011: 53) saw “the superdiversity of cities and societies of the 21st cen-
tury” and suggested that their rise is “both inevitable (because of global ows of
migration, ows of information, capital, risks, etc.) and politically challenging.”
However, he added,
It is in this sense that over the last decades the cultural, social and political
landscapes of diversity are changing radically, but we still use old maps to
orientate ourselves. In other words, my main thesis is: we do not even have the
language through which contemporary superdiversity in the world can be described,
conceptualized, understood, explained and researched.
(Ibid., italics in original)
In this way, superdiversity has been a generative concept, stimulating works
in a tremendous variety of elds. In June 2022, Google Scholar indicates that
the original Ethnic and Racial Studies journal article (Vertovec 2007) has been
cited over 7,200 times, while the COMPAS Working Paper on superdiver-
sity (Vertovec 2006), on which the 2007 article is based, has been cited over
850 times. These academic citations are found in journals across a span of dis-
ciplines including Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Political Science,
Sociolinguistics and History, and particularly in the research elds of Migration
Studies and Social Policy. Beyond articles, at least a dozen books on superdi-
versity have been published, too. These include titles such as On Superdiversity
(Ramadan 2011), Superdiversity in the Heart of Europe (Geldof 2016), Diversity and
Super-diversity (De Fina et al. 2017) and The Routledge Handbook of Language and
Superdiversity (Creese and Blackledge 2018a).
Following Beck, much of this profuse scholarly interest and endeavour trig-
gered by the superdiversity concept has represented a kind of search for lan-
guage and lines of thought to describe ever better various, often interdependent,
contemporary and emergent modes and forms of social complexity. As stated
by Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge (2018b: xxiii), “More than merely
describing the diversication of diversity as a result of recent migration, super-
diversity has the potential to oer an interdisciplinary perspective on change
and complexity in changing social and cultural worlds.” That’s why, as a way
of developing the approach and insights oered by the superdiversity concept,
this book moves from discussions of the concept and it uses to related forms of
diversication, to responses to processes of diversication and superdiversity, to
an explicit concern with emergent features of social complexity more broadly.
Running through all of these topics are concerns with diversication, categori-
zation and the shaping of multiple categories, mutually conditioning processes,
10 Introduction
social stratication and inequality. In these ways, each chapter is intended to add
something to our broader understanding of complexication processes within
the co-dependent realms of social categorizations and social formations.
Chapter synopses
The material compiled for this book is wide-ranging, entailing an enterprise
conjoining many approaches and disciplines. This kind of synthesis draws on
many years of experience, initially by early training in both Anthropology and
the multidisciplinary eld of Religious Studies. This was followed by successive
postdoctoral fellowships and jobs in university departments of Anthropology,
Geography and Sociology. I have also had a career with positions traversing
American, British and German intellectual environments. Finally, I believe that
I learned much about academic cross-fertilization while serving as Founding
Director of three major interdisciplinary institutions: namely, the British
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Transnational Communities
Programme, ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS),
and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Although I would still hold that there is no single or even ideal way to “do inter-
disciplinarity,” I believe these experiences helped me to be able to make connec-
tions, “translate” and develop common conceptual frameworks spanning several
social sciences. Disciplinary purists may not like the ways that I draw from oth-
erwise distinct methods and bodies of terminology and theory, but I believe this
is absolutely necessary if we are to gain better purchase on our attempts to grasp
complex social processes, forms and dynamics.
Although I have done a certain amount of research in places like Trinidad,
Singapore and South Africa, I am fully aware that most examples in this book
draw from European and North American contexts. This reliance on the Global
North certainly has serious limitations if not drawbacks. However, I have to
write with condence about contexts I know best. I try to indicate literature
from contexts in the Global South as and where I can, since most of the processes
and phenomena I discuss are certainly to be found in these parts of the world too.
In any case, it is not for me to decide or impose my conceptual frameworks on
these locations, but for local voices to draw upon or critique these ideas in light
of the contexts that they themselves know best. This has certainly been the case
with the concept of superdiversity, which has indeed been taken up extensively
in and by scholars of the Global South.
And so to the Chapter summaries. Given that I can by no means assume that
the reader is familiar with the original Ethnic and Racial Studies article which has
made an impact on the eld, this is reproduced in its entirely as Chapter 2. Much
of the rest of the book refers to this primary publication, so it is useful to have
it incorporated. This piece is where I introduce the concept as a way to make
sense of changes in the nature of diversity – both its forms and its representation.
Idraw on a range of data in the UK to indicate shifts in migrant populations
Introduction 11
across key categories such as county of origin, gender, age, language, religion
and legal status. Signicantly, the uctuating combinations of these categories
across sets of migrant newcomers were seen to change the social conguration
of London and Britain. The emergent nature of migrant-driven diversication
superseded the congurations of diversity in Britain that preceded them – hence
I called it superdiversity. Beyond showing these changes, the article draws atten-
tion to some of the challenges this changing reality poses to certain areas of
research and to social policy.
As mentioned previously, this 2007 Ethnic and Racial Studies article and its
concept of superdiversity quickly gained traction across the social sciences, par-
ticularly in Europe. In a handful of years, it became and remains the most cited
article in the leading journal’s history. However, the ways in which the concept
has been understood, used, abused, criticized and utilized as a springboard for
theoretical and methodological development are many. Chapter 3 reviews the
multiple meanings of superdiversity as they appear in a now considerable litera-
ture across the social sciences. This includes a typology of eight ways in which
superdiversity has been invoked. That is, as: a marker of very much diversity; a
context or backdrop to for research studies; a description of “more ethnicity”;
a call to move beyond ethnicity in social analysis; a multidimensional recong-
uration of social categories; the grounds for a methodological reassessment of a
eld or discipline; a way of addressing emergent social complexities (around glo-
balization and migration, ethnic categories, and new social formations); and the
basis for addressing a eld of political policy and governance. Special attention
is given to Sociolinguistics, within which an entire new eld of “sociolinguistic
superdiversity” has arisen, and History, in which experts have debated superdi-
versity’s “newness” and eects. I also address some important criticisms that have
been made around the concept, especially with regard to notions of race and rac-
ism, power, colonialism, and the academic endeavour itself. Even if sometimes
based on misnomers, these are healthy and useful conversations to have. If it has
achieved nothing else, it seems that the concept of superdiversity, “with all the
semantic breath and dening ramications that characterize it, has opened an
interpretive door, and made possible an analytical framework that diers from
the rest” (López Peláez et al. 2022: 161).
Some scholars, including myself and my colleague Fran Meissner, suggested
that superdiversity addresses not just an emergent social condition but a variety
of interconnected processes of diversication that lead to it, sustain it and stem
from it. Chapter 4 describes a number of these processes, especially around
migration-driven and demographically arising modalities. Migration-driven
diversication entails major transformations of international migration ows
over the past thirty years or so. People are increasingly moving for more com-
plex reasons in terms of various, mixed and compounded causes spanning polit-
ical, social, economic, demographic and environmental spheres. This is linked
to the fact that more people are moving across borders from more countries. At
the same time, migration categories and legal statuses have become ever more
12 Introduction
perplex – that is, complicated, confounding and designed to hamper, sort and
stratify migrants in their countries of destination. These, in themselves, are a
source of much inequality. Yet even without migration-driven diversications,
many countries are diversifying demographically or in terms of ocial state cat-
egories such as race and ethnicity. The demographic makeup of cities (especially
in the Global North, but also in the South) is diversifying in several ways while
economic hierarchies largely remain. Other signicant features of demographic
change include: the dierential ethnoracial proles of contrasting age cohorts;
the marked rise in the number of people identifying as “mixed,” a develop-
ment calling into question the nature of ocial categories themselves; and the
proliferation of languages and innovative language practices in given localities,
leading to both new modes of discrimination and to intriguing if not exciting
new forms of communication.
How do people react to these kinds of diversication and superdiversity
appearing around them? Chapter 5 examines some of the main public responses to
diversication. This includes a look at the seeming paradox that, according to sur-
veys, many people generally accept if not value the current levels of dierence and
diversity in their country or immediate living environment, but express anxiety
about increasing levels. In order to address this paradox, the chapter approaches the
topic by asking: what do people actually know, think, and understand about the
diversication of their societies, and how do they react perceptually, socially and
politically? What is it about increasing diversication that especially prompts neg-
ative reactions? A key to assessing these matters lies in the nature of social catego-
rization, or how people construct categories to make sense of the social world, and
how they place others in them. At the core of the ways such categories are often
made and maintained in much public understanding are a set of important con-
ceptual premises or outlooks: groupism (an assumption that society is comprised
of numerous bounded, xed, internally homogeneous groups), singular alia-
tion (a belief that everyone pre-eminently belongs to one or another signicant
group), culturalism (a view that cultures are neat, discrete packages of immutable
traits), and racialization (the idea that culture and group belonging are natural
or genetic). These premises tend to support the presumption that there must be
some kind of threshold beyond which “too much” diversity will have unwanted
consequences. This is a central reason for anxieties around diversication. Yet the
chapter also includes a look at several prominent theories concerning negative
public responses to diversication. Features of such negative responses are often
stoked and played upon by right-wing politicians. Conversely, the emergence of
positive attitudes stemming from diversication are examined, as well, especially
with regard to longstanding ideas around contact theory. That is, research shows
how even in cases where diversication is at rst reacted to negatively, over time
and with increasing contact between people, attitudes toward dierence consid-
erably improve. Indeed, important ndings across 46 countries shows that the
perception of diversication itself serves to break down crude conceptualizations
and stereotypes, leading to more positive social relations over time.
Introduction 13
All of these topics signalled by superdiversity – changing migration congu-
rations, varieties of diversication, modes of social categorization and contrasting
responses to them – together entail features of social complexication. In order
to better help meet the challenge, expounded earlier by Beck (2011: 53), of nd-
ing “the language through which contemporary superdiversity in the world can
be described, conceptualized, understood, explained and researched,” Chapter 6
explores the ways we might consider social complexity. Within Anthropology, com-
plexity has long been regarded as an evolutionary feature of social organization,
with societies incrementally becoming more complex (especially stratied and role
dierentiated) over time. Yet some anthropologists, namely Fredrik Barth, Ulf
Hannerz and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, have also crucially stressed the complexity
of human meanings – grounded in dierential social positions – as fundamental
components of social complexity as well. While bearing these insights in mind, the
chapter draws on some central notions from complexity science (such as multiple
causation, non-linearity and emergence) before returning to the realm of meanings,
in this case the idea of social dierences and social categorization as discussed in
Chapter 5. Especially with regard to examples around race and ethnicity, gender
and sexuality, religion, and language, we can observe how many basic social cate-
gories are being unmade, made, mixed and multiplied in ways that serve not only to
make societies more complex, but to create and sustain structures of what has been
called complex inequality. These are processes that occur across online and oine
practices, too. These multiplicities of categorization and identication are not just
evident across society, but within individuals. Therefore, the chapter rounds o
with an exposition of Social Identity Complexity theory in contemporary Social
Psychology. This entails the ways and degrees to which individuals are aware of
their own distinct multiple identity categories. Extensive research in this eld shows
that when individuals rely less on singular, essentialized categories of identication
and have more awareness of their own identity complexity, the more likely they are
to develop positive attitudes and interactions with others. In conditions of increasing
superdiversity, this nding holds much potential for mitigating negative responses
to diversication and improving social relationships more broadly. Perhaps this is in
line with the hopes of author Suketu Mehta, who writes:
We classify people in huge categories: blacks, whites, migrants, trans, femi-
nists, police, Democrats, Republicans. And then each member of that cate-
gory has to walk around with the heavy weight of this classication on their
head. Within each group, we are assumed to be fungible. The individual
human being is complex… Diversity, or heterogeneity, will save us.
2021
The concluding Chapter 7 recaps central discussions and points made through-
out the book. These are important, it is argued, as superdiversity, diversication,
and their relations to social stratication are bound to continue if not magnify
in a future conditioned by climate change and its eects on global migration.
14 Introduction
Enhanced understandings of social complexity will be critical for the future of
social science. A signicant base for such understandings is the recognition of
social categories as multiple, unxed and porous as opposed to views of social
categories based on groupism, singular aliation, culturalism, racialization and
linguistic boundedness. Such a perspective can be enhanced not just within
academia, but in public life as well. In this chapter, it is suggested that inter-
ventions in policy, political representation and information campaigns might
support the shift to more widespread rethinking of social categories. One of the
main points of this chapter is that, in ever-complexifying contexts of superdiver-
sity, in order to promote more complex understanding of social categories, we
should not to do away altogether with group categories but foster awareness of
category plus– that is, the recognition that individuals are always part of more than
one category, and any category involves people with more that than identity.
Superdiversity is a concept intended primarily to help an observer gain a per-
spective to interpret what is going on by way of the diversication of societies.
The trends are of utmost signicance to how societies do and can work, how
social structures do and can function, and how people do and can treat one
another. To echo Geertz: how we conceive and think about dierence does and
can have considerable impacts outside of the conceptual realm. It is hoped that
the concept of superdiversity, along with other ideas oered in this book, might
have such positive bearing.
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16 Introduction
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DOI: 10.4324/9780203503577-2
2
SUPER-DIVERSITY AND ITS
IMPLICATIONS (2007)
[This chapter reproduces the original article from 2007 in which the concept of
super-diversity was introduced.]
At a Trafalgar Square vigil for the victims of the 7 July 2005 terrorist attacks–
in which victims included migrants from more than twenty countries and alleged
perpetrators from a further six – Mayor Ken Livingstone stated that in London
“you see the world gathered in one city, living in harmony, as an example to all
(in Freedland 2005). The “world in one city” idea was also the title of a special
section in The Guardian newspaper celebrating “the most cosmopolitan place on
earth” where “Never have so many dierent kinds of people tried living together
in the same place before” (Benedictus and Godwin 2005, p. 2). The “world in one
city” was the title of the Greater London Authority’s analysis of the 2001 Census
(GLA 2005a), too, which examined the presence of people from 179 nations within
the capital. The successful London bid to host the 2012 Olympics also used the
“world in one city” slogan, suggesting that “In 2012, our multicultural diver-
sity will mean every competing nation in the Games will nd local supporters as
enthusiastic as back home” (www.london2012.org/en/city/onecity).
To be sure, the ethnic and country of origin diversity of London is remarka-
ble. Such diversity is manifesting in other parts of the country as well. However,
observing ethnicity or country of origin (the two often, and confusingly, being
used interchangeably) provides a misleading, one-dimensional appreciation of
contemporary diversity. Over the past ten years, the nature of immigration to
Britain has brought with it a transformative “diversication of diversity” (cf.
Hollinger 1995, Martiniello 2004) not just in terms of bringing more ethnicities
and countries of origin, but also with respect to a multiplication of signicant
variables that aect where, how and with whom people live.
In the last decade the proliferation and mutually conditioning eects of
additional variables shows that it is not enough to see diversity only in terms
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 19
of ethnicity, as is regularly the case both in social science and the wider pub-
lic sphere. Such additional variables include dierential immigration statuses and
their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labour market
experiences, discrete gender and age proles, patterns of spatial distribution, and
mixed local area responses by service providers and residents. Rarely are these
factors described side by side. The interplay of these factors is what is meant here,
in summary fashion, by the notion of “super-diversity”.
By invoking “super-diversity” I wish, rstly, to underscore the fact that in addi-
tion to more people now migrating from more places, signicant new conjunctions
and interactions of variables have arisen through patterns of immigration to the UK
over the past decade; their outcomes surpass the ways – in public discourse, policy
debates and academic literature – that we usually understand diversity in Britain.
Secondly, then, the article serves as a call – or at least reminder – to social scientists
and policy-makers to take more sucient account of the conjunction of ethnicity
with a range of other variables when considering the nature of various “communi-
ties”, their composition, trajectories, interactions and public service needs.
Much of the material and data in this article is certainly not new or unknown
to specialists in the eld; what is hopefully of value, however, is its assemblage
and juxtaposition by way of re-assessing how diversity is conventionally con-
ceived. My view draws upon several previous approaches to diversity, particularly
concerning: multi-ethnic arenas of interaction (importantly Lamphere 1992 and
Sanjek 1998), hypersegregation or the simultaneous impact of numerous dimen-
sions of ethnic residential concentration (Massey and Denton 1989), minorities’
“multilayered experience” within unequal power structures and social locations
(Harzig and Juteau 2003), and notions of pluralism that take into account dif-
ferential rights and modes of incorporation among ethnic groups (Kuper and
Smith 1969). I have also been particularly inuenced by ideas around cultural
complexity as considered by Fredrik Barth (1989, 1993) and Ulf Hannerz (1992),
particularly their thinking about modes of cultural conuence, the coexistence
of multiple historical streams and the ways individuals in complex settings relate
to each other from dierent vantage points.
Again, the variables of super-diversity themselves are not new, nor are many
of their correlations. But, as described in this article, it is the emergence of their
scale, historical and policy-produced multiple conguration and mutual condi-
tioning that now calls for conceptual distinction. “Super-diversity” is proposed
as a summary term. Whatever we choose to call it, there is much to be gained by
a multi-dimensional perspective on diversity, both in terms of moving beyond
“the ethnic group as either the unit of analysis or sole object of study” (Glick
Schiller et al. 2006, p. 613) and by appreciating the coalescence of factors which
condition people’s lives.
Noting similar changes concerning urban social, geographic and economic
conditions in North American cities and patterns of diversication among ethnic
groups themselves, Eric Fong and Kumiko Shibuya (2005, p. 286) suggest that
“theories developed in the past may have only limited application in the study of
20 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
multigroup relations today.” The present article follows a similar line. In the rst
part a variety of data is presented indicating the emergence of super-diversity
(especially pointing to developments in London, but emphasizing that these
variables, dimensions and dynamics hold proportionately in many other parts
of the UK too); this is followed by sections suggesting some implications that
super-diversity may have for social scientic theory and method alongside
challenges it poses for particular areas of public policy formation and delivery.
Diversity in Britain
Diversity is endemic to Britain, of course. Peter Ackroyd’s (2000) monumental
London: The Biography describes the long history of a city of assorted immigrants.
Roman Londinium was full of administrators, traders, soldiers and slaves from
Gaul, Greece, Germany, Italy and North Africa. “By the tenth century,”
Ackroyd (Ibid., p. 702) writes, “the city was populated by Cymric Brythons and
Belgae, by remnants of the Gaulish legions, by East Saxons and Mercians, by
Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, by Franks and Jutes and Angles, all mingled and
mingling together to form a distinct tribe of ‘Londoners’.
In the late twelfth century locals throughout Britain complained that all sorts
of foreigners were practicing their own customs, and by the early sixteenth cen-
tur y such intolerance saw r iots in which shops and homes of foreig ners were burnt.
In the middle of the eighteenth century diversity fuelled a struggle between peo-
ple with “culturally cosmopolitan” outlooks and those with populist xenopho-
bic attitudes (Statt 1995). Nineteenth-century poets like Wordsworth described
London’s heterogeneity of peoples, while in an 1880 book The Huguenots, Samuel
Smiles called London “one of the most composite populations to be found in
the world” (in Holmes 1997, p. 10). Indeed, as Michael Keith (2005, pp. 49–50)
notes, “There is not a point in the history of London when cultural dierences
have not played a signicant role in shaping the life of the city.”
Irish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Jews from throughout
eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised
signicant immigrant inuxes. Yet it was the post-war large-scale immigration
of African-Caribbean and South Asian (i.e. non-White) peoples which particu-
larly prompted a set of changes in public policy. British policy-makers responded
with various strategies for a kind of diversity management strategy that came to
be called multiculturalism.
In this way most of the discourse, policy and public understanding of migration
and multiculturalism evident in Britain over the past thirty years has been based on
the experience of people who arrived between the 1950s and 1970s from Jamaica,
Trinidad, Guyana and other places in the West Indies alongside those from India,
Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. These were major inows from former
British colonies, with people subject to initial rights of entry that were gradually
restricted during the 1960s and early 1970s until only families of settled migrants
could enter. Citizenship and all the civil, political and social rights associated with
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 21
it were gained by most under post-colonial arrangements (Hansen and Weil 2001).
Large and eventually well-organized communities were formed, particularly
through the establishment of community associations and places of worship.
Multicultural policies have had as their overall goal the promotion of tolerance
and respect for collective identities. This has been undertaken through support-
ing community associations and their cultural activities, monitoring diversity in
the workplace, encouraging positive images in the media and other public spaces,
and modifying public services (including education, health, policing and courts) in
order to accommodate culture-based dierences of value, language and social prac-
tice. While developed from the 1960s onwards, most of these policies and goals still
obtain today. Meanwhile, multiculturalism continues to be conceived of mainly in
terms of the African-Caribbean and South Asian communities of British citizens.
New, smaller, less organized, legally dierentiated and non-citizen immi-
grant groups have hardly gained attention or a place on the public agenda (cf.
Kofman 1998). Yet it is the growth of exactly these sorts of groups that has in
recent years radically transformed the social landscape in Britain. The time has
come to re-evaluate – in social scientic study as well as policy – the nature of
diversity in Britain today.
New immigrants and the emergence of super-diversity
Over the past ten to fteen years, immigration – and consequently the nature
of diversity – in the UK has changed dramatically. Since the early 1990s there
has been a marked rise in net immigration and a diversication of countries
of origin. This shift has coincided with no less than six Parliamentary meas-
ures: the Asylum and Immigration Acts of 1993, 1996, 1999, the Nationality,
Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 and
the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill 2005. Throughout this time there
has been a proliferation of migration channels and immigrant legal statuses. In
addition, this decade was a time when numerous conicts were taking place
around the world leading to a signicant expansion in the numbers of those
seeking asylum. The various ows and channels have been characterised as “the
new migration” and the people involved as “the new immigrants” (see Robinson
and Reeve 2005, Berkeley et al. 2005, Kyambi 2005). Multiple dimensions of
dierentiation characterize the emergent social patterns and conditions.
Net inows
Prior to the early 1990s, the UK was characterized by net outows of people;
since 1994 it has been marked by net inows. Annual net inows of immigrants
to Britain peaked at 171,000 in 2000, declined to 151,000 by 2003 then rose
markedly to 222,600 in 2004 (Oce for National Statistics, www.statisics.gov.uk).
In 2004 there were an estimated 2,857,000 foreigners (foreign-born and without
UK citizenship) living in the UK, comprising some 4.9% of the total population
22 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
of 58,233,000 (Salt 2004). This number represented an increase of some 857,000
or over 40% since 1993. There have been substantial further increases since eight
new states acceded to the European Union in 2004 (see below).
There are many simultaneous reasons for the increased net inows. One set
of reasons surround Britain’s high economic performance (including low unem-
ployment and job shortages in some sectors) coupled with growing inequali-
ties in many developing and middle-income countries (Hatton 2003). Much of
the increase during the 1990s was within the category of asylum seekers: while
there have been many accusations that a high proportion of these are “bogus”
or “really economic migrants”, the increase in asylum-seekers over the past ten
years has been demonstrated to be directly linked with forced migration factors
and conict situations in source countries during this time (Castles et al. 2003).
Even before EU accession, migration ows from Eastern Europe also increased
since the opening of borders following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (see
Kaczmarczyk and Okólski 2005).
Countries of origin
One of the most noteworthy features of “the new migration” is the multiplicity
of immigrants’ countries of origin. Moreover, most of this new and diverse
range of origins relates to places which have no specic historical – particularly,
colonial – links with Britain.
In the 1950s and 1960s almost all immigrants came from colonies or
Commonwealth countries (again, mostly in the Caribbean and South Asia).
By the early 1970s most newcomers were arriving as dependants of the newly
settled migrants. The decades since then have seen fairly dramatic change.
Alongside relatively constant inows of returning British people, in 1971
people from “Old” and “New” Commonwealth countries accounted for 30%
and 32% of inow; by 2002 these proportions were 17% and 20% respectively.
EU citizens represented 10% of newcomers in 1971, rising to 17% in 2002;
however, those in a broad “Middle East and Other” category have gone from
16% in 1971 to 40% in 2002 (National Statistics Online). Since the beginning
of the 1990s alone, the diversity of immigrants’ places of origin has been grow-
ing considerably (see Figure 2.1).
Britain is now home – temporary, permanent or one among many – to people
from practically every country in the world. As Table 2.1 suggests, various waves
of immigrants from rich, middle income and poor countries have accumulated.
All the groups, as well as many individuals within these, have diverse migration
experiences in the UK – some over the last decade, others over generations, still
others over more than a century. With regard to this dimension of super-diversity,
we should consider how the assorted origins and experiences of migrants condi-
tion social relations with non-migrant Britons and with each other.
In London alone there are people from some 179 countries. Many represent just
a handful of people, but there are populations numbering over 10,000 respectively
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 23
FIGURE 2.1 Net international migration to Britain by citizenship
Source: statistics.gov.uk
TABL E 2 .1 Foreign nationals living in the UK, largest twenty-vegroups, 2004
Rank Nationality Number in UK Percent
1Ireland 368000 12.9
2India 171000 6.0
3USA 133000 4.7
4Italy 121000 4.2
5Germany 96000 3.4
6France 95000 3.3
7 South Africa 92000 3.2
8Pakistan 86000 3.0
9Portugal 83000 2.9
10 Australia 80000 2.8
11 Zimbabwe 73000 2.5
12 Bangladesh 69000 2.4
13 Somalia 60000 2.1
14 Former Yugoslavia 54000 1.9
15 Philippines 52000 1.8
16 Turkey 51000 1.8
17 Netherlands 48000 1.7
18 Poland 48000 1.7
19 Jamaica 45000 1.6
20 Former USSR 44000 1.5
21 Nigeria 43000 1.5
22 Spain 40000 1.4
23 Greece 37000 1.3
24 Canada 37000 1.3
25 Iran 36000 1.3
All foreign nationals 2,857,000 100
Source: Salt (2004).
24 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
from each of no less than 42 countries; there are populations of over 5,000 from a
further 12 countries (GLA 2005a). Reecting trends in Britain as a whole, 23 per
cent of foreign-born people came to London before 1970, 32 per cent between
1970 and 1990 and 45 per cent since 1990. The 25 largest such populations reect a
wide range of countries, from rich to poor, peaceful to conict-ridden, European
to African and Asian (Table 2.2). Overall 30% of London’s migrants are from high
income countries and 70% are from developing countries (GLA 2005b)
Once more, the above gures for both the UK and London will by now have
changed considerably, not least due to the inux of eastern Europeans both before
and after EU accession in May 2004.
Foreign-origin populations in London are widespread and unevenly distrib-
uted (see Kyambi 2005). The borough of Brent has the highest percentage of its
2001 population born outside the EU, with 38.2% (100,543 people), followed by
Newham with 35.6% (86,858 people), Westminster with 32.4% (58,770 people)
and Ealing with 31% (93,169 people) (see www.statistics.gov.uk). Within each
such area, the diversity of origins is staggering, as depicted by way of example in
Figure 2.2 with reference to Newham.
TAB LE 2 .2 Number of people living in London by Country
ofBirth outside the UK, largest twenty-ve groups, 2001
Rank Country of birth Number
1India 172,162
2Republic of Ireland 157,285
3Bangladesh 84,565
4Jamaica 80,319
5Nigeria 68,907
6Pakistan 66,658
7Kenya 66 ,311
8 Sri Lanka 49,932
9Ghana 46,513
10 Cyprus 45,888
11 South Africa 45,506
12 U.S.A. 44,622
13 Australia 41,488
14 Germany 39,818
15 Turkey 39,128
16 Italy 38,694
17 France 38,130
18 Somalia 33,831
19 Uganda 32,082
20 New Zealand 27,494
21 Hong Kong 23,328
22 Spain 22,473
23 Poland 22,224
24 Portugal 21,720
25 Iran 20,398
Source: GLA (2005a).
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 25
Such a relatively new and high proportion of immigrants characterizes many
places in the UK, but London most. Of the local authorities with the highest
percentage of population who are non-UK born, the top twenty-two are all
London boroughs, from the rst, Brent with 46.5% of its 263,463 population, to
the twenty-second, Redbridge with 24.2% of its 238,634 population.
However, high proportions of foreign-born – with all the accompanying
dimensions of diversity that go with them – are found throughout the UK (see
especially Kyambi 2005). In these terms, outside of London it is Slough that has
the highest proportion, nationally ranked as twenty-third among local authori-
ties, with 22.3% of its 119,072 population counted as foreign-born. Leicester and
Forest Heath are ranked twenty-fourth and twenty-fth (each with 23% of their
respective populations of 279,925 and 55,523), Luton twenty-seventh (19.6% of
184,369) and Oxford twenty-ninth (19.3% of 134,250); intervening ranks are
again London local authorities (2001 census). Among the foreign-born, regions
of origin are quite varyingly distributed. By way of example, Figure 2.3 indicates
such dierential patterns of distribution in four cities of Britain.
FIGURE 2.2 Newham (total; population 243,898) by country/region of birth
Source: 2001 census
26 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
While pointing to important indicators of diversity, country of origin data itself,
however, may mask more signicant forms of dierentiation than it reveals.
Within any particular population from a given country, there will be important
distinctions with reference to ethnicity, religious aliation and practice, regional
and local identities in places of origin, kinship, clan or tribal aliation, political
parties and movements, and other criteria of collective belonging. Linguistic
dierentiation, for instance, represents one such important social marker which
may lie within one or more country of origin categories.
Languages
The growth of multilingualism has been recognized and engaged in various
ways by both social scientists and policymakers, although the latter have often
arguably failed to respond in positive or adequate ways (Rampton et al. 1997).
Still, it is now often proclaimed with pride (for instance in the city’s successful
2012 Olympic bid) that 300 languages are spoken in London. This gure is
based on a survey of no less than 896,743 London schoolchildren concerning
which language(s) they speak at home (Baker and Mohieldeen 2000). Despite
some methodological aws, this remarkable data source provides an important
look into a much under-studied eld of diversity in the UK. The study does
FIGURE 2.3 Local authorities by non-UK region of birth (with total foreign-born
percent of local population)
Source: 2001 census
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 27
not take account of languages among groups with few children in schools (for
instance because of a high number of young, single migrants in a particular
group), which would represent ones like Polish, Czech, Hungarian and other
east European languages. Nevertheless, ndings like those in Table 2.3 indicate
sometimes surprisingly sizeable numbers speaking particular languages within
a divergent range.
The data also show some interesting local congurations. There are predictable
groupings of South Asian languages in places of renowned Asian settlement like
Harrow, where the top three non-English languages are Gujarati, Hindi/Urdu
and Punjabi. Other places show fascinating conjunctions, such as in Haringey
where Turkish is commonly spoken alongside Akan and Somali, in Lambeth
where Yoruba speakers mingle with speakers of Portuguese and Spanish, and in
Merton where English Creole is common next to Cantonese and French (Baker
and Mohieldeen 2000). In Tower Hamlets, where British Bangladeshis are highly
concentrated, “the demand for Eastern European language services collectively
now exceeds that for Sylheti translation” (Keith 2005, p. 177).
School districts, health services and local authorities are among those institu-
tions which have to meet the challenges of growing linguistic complexity. Many
new initiatives have arisen for this purpose. For example, the Language Shop
provides a comprehensive translation and interpretation service in more than 100
languages to Newham Council and its partners, such as community groups and
TABLE 2.3 Estimated number of speakers of top
20languages in London, 2000
Rank Language name Number
1English 5,636,500
2Panjabi 155,700
3Gujarati 149,6 0 0
4Hindi/Urdu 136,500
5 Bengali & Sylheti 136,300
6Turk i s h 73,900
7Arabic 53,900
8English Creole 50,700
9Cantonese 47,900
10 Yoruba 47,600
11 Greek 31,100
12 Portuguese 29,400
13 French 27,600
14 Akan (Twi & Fante) 27, 5 0 0
15 Spanish 26,700
16 Somali 22,343
17 Tamil 19,2 00
18 Vietnamese 16,80 0
19 Farsi 16,20 0
20 Italian 12,300
Source: Storkey (2000).
28 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
neighbouring councils, while Language Line provides telephone or in-person
translations in 150 languages to health authorities and other public sector clients.
Religions
The religious diversity that migrants have brought to Britain is well documented
and is not possible to detail here (see for instance Parsons 1994, Peach 2005 as
well as National Statistics Online). On the whole we can say that among immi-
grants to Britain, Christianity is the main religion for people born in all conti-
nents except Asia; Asia-born people in the UK are more likely to be Muslim than
any other religion, although of course Indians include a majority of Hindus and
a signicant number of Sikhs. For many, religions tend to be broadly equitable
with countries of origin – Irish and Jamaicans are mostly Christian, Bangladeshis
mostly Muslim and so forth – but even so these categories often miss important
variations in devotional traditions within each of the world religions.
Taking Islam as example, it is often pointed out that there are several traditions
within the faith as practiced by South Asians in the UK (Deobandi, Tablighi,
Barelvi, Su orders and more; see Lewis 2002). Such variations are multiplied
many times when we consider the breadth of origins among Muslims from
around the world who now live in Britain (such as Nigerians, Somalis, Bosnians,
Afghans, Iraqis and Malaysians). In London Muslims are the most heterogeneous
body of believers in terms of ethnicity and country of origin, with the largest
group (Bangladeshis) making up only 23.5%. “London’s Muslim population
of 607,083 people is probably the most diverse anywhere in the world, besides
Mecca” (The Guardian 21 January 2005).
Socio-cultural axes of dierentiation such as country of origin, ethnicity, lan-
guage and religion are of course signicant in conditioning immigrants’ identities,
patterns of interaction and – often through social networks determined by such axes–
their access to jobs, housing, services and more. However, immigrants’ channels of
migration and the myriad legal statuses which arise from them are often just as, or
even more, crucial to: how people group themselves and where people live, how
long they can stay, how much autonomy they have (versus control by an employer,
for instance), whether their families can join them, what kind of livelihood they can
undertake and maintain, and to what extent they can make use of public services and
resources (including schools, health, training, benets and other “recourse to public
funds”). Therefore such channels and statuses, along with the rights and restrictions
attached to them (Morris 2002), comprise an additional – indeed, fundamental –
dimension of today’s patterns and dynamics of super-diversity.
Migration channels and immigration statuses
Coinciding with the increasing inux of immigrants to the UK in the 1990s,
there has been an expansion in the number and kind of migration channels
and immigration statuses. Each carries quite specic and legally enforceable
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 29
entitlements, controls, conditions and limitations (see JCWI 2004). The follow-
ing section outlines many of the key channels and statuses, particularly with
regard to how they have shaped current patterns of super-diversity in the UK.
Workers
Between 1993 and 2003 the number of foreign workers in the UK rose no less
than 62% to 1,396,000 (Sriskandarajah et al. 2004). This large-scale increase in
workers includes people who have come under numerous categories and quota
systems (see Clarke and Salt 2003, Salt 2004, Kofman et al. 2005). These have
included: foreign nationals who do not need a visa or permit to work in the
UK (mainly members of the European Economic Area, including members of
the eight new EU accession states who can travel to the UK freely, but should
register with government oces if they nd employment; by mid-2006 there
were some 427,000 applications under this Worker Registration Scheme); work
permit holders (whose employers obtained the permits); workers on special
schemes (especially the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme and the Sector
Based Scheme directed mainly at hotels, catering and food processing industries);
highly skilled migrants (from over 50 countries, working in nance, business
management, information technology and medical services); working holiday-
makers (from more than 90% from “Old Commonwealth” countries such as
New Zealand and Australia); and special visa holders (importantly including
domestic workers, au pairs, volunteers and religious instructors).
Students
The number of foreign students entering the UK recently peaked at 369,000 in
2002 before reducing to 319,000 in 2003. Non-EU students accounted for some
38% of all full-time higher degree students in 2003 (Kofman et al. 2005, p. 20);
they numbered over 210,000 in 2004. In this year 47,700 Chinese students came
to Britain, marking a seventeen-fold increase from the 2,800 Chinese students
in the UK in 1998. The number of Indian students has grown from under 3,000
in 1998 to nearly 15,000 in 2004. The third largest sender is the USA with over
13,000 students in 2004.
Spouses and family members
This is an extremely important immigration category, not least since “family
migration has emerged as the single most enduring, though also restricted, basis
for entry of migrants to the UK” (Kofman et al. 2005, p. 22). The number of
migrating spouses and family members coming to the UK more than doubled
between 1993-2003. Furthermore this is a particularly feminised channel of
migration compared with others; for instance, of the 95,000 grants of settlement
to spouses and dependents in 2004, 20.6% were made for husbands, 40% for
30 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
wives and 28.8% children. Their geographical provenance varied signicantly,
however: the Indian sub-continent was origin to 36% of husbands, 28% of wives
and 15% of children; the rest of Asia brought 8% of husbands, 21% of wives and
18% of children, while from Africa there came 24% of husbands, 17% of wives
and 42% of children (Salt 2004). Not all have come under the same conditions:
within the spouses and family migrant category Kofman (2004) distinguishes
a number of types, including family reunication migration (bringing mem-
bers of immediate family), family formation migration (bringing marriage part-
ners from country of origin), marriage migration (bringing partners met while
abroad) and family migration (when all members migrate simultaneously).
Asylum-seekers and Refugees
Throughout the 1990s the number of asylum applications rose considerably in
the UK and indeed throughout Europe. Applications (including dependents) in
Britain rose from 28,000 in 1993 to a peak of 103,100 in 2002; these amounted
respectively to 15.6% and 26.5% of all non-British immigration (179,200 in 1993
and 418,200 in 2002). Applications have since declined signicantly: in 2003 the
number of asylum applications declined to 60,045 (which is 14.7% of 406,800 total
non-British immigrants; Salt 2004, p. 71). This too is a highly gendered channel
of migration: in 2003 some 69% were male. The provenance of asylum-seekers
represents a broad range: again in 2003 applications were received from persons
spanning over 50 nationalities, including 10% Somali, 8% Iraqi, 7% Chinese, 7%
Zimbabwean, and 6% Iranian. However, numbers of asylum-seekers from various
countries have uctuated much over the years (see Table 2.4).
Many asylum-seekers wait long periods for decisions, many are rejected and
leave the country, others are rejected and stay as irregular migrants. It is esti-
mated that some 28% of asylum applicants are granted asylum, extended leave to
remain, humanitarian protection or some other category allowing them to stay
TABLE 2.4 Applications received for asylum in the United Kingdom 1994–2003,
selected nationalities
Nationality 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Serbia-Montenegro n /a n/a 400 1865 7395 11465 6070 3230 2265 815
Turkey 2045 1820 1495 14 45 2015 2850 3990 3695 2835 2390
Nigeria 4340 5825 2900 14 80 1380 945 835 810 1125 1010
Somalia 1840 3465 1780 2730 4685 749 5 5020 6420 6540 5090
Zimbabwe 55 105 130 60 80 230 1010 2140 7655 3295
Iran 520 615 585 585 745 1320 5 610 3420 2630 2875
Iraq 550 930 965 1075 1295 1800 7475 6680 14570 4015
Afghanistan 325 580 675 1085 2395 3975 5555 8920 7205 2280
Sri Lanka 2350 2070 1340 183 0 3505 5130 6395 5510 3130 705
All nationalities 32830 439 65 29640 32500 46015 71160 8 031 5 71025 8 4130 49405
Source: Salt (2004).
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 31
in the UK (Salt 2004). Cumulatively there were some 289,100 refugees in UK by
the end of 2004 (UNHCR 2005).
Irregular, illegal or undocumented migrants
This category, variously termed, pertains to people whose presence is marked by
clandestine entry, entry by deceit, overstaying or breaking the terms of a visa. It
is not a black-and-white classication, however: Anderson and Ruhs (2005) dis-
cuss grey areas of “semi-compliance” under which only some, sometimes minor,
conditions are violated.
As Pinkerton et al. (2004) describe, it is very dicult to reliably estimate
numbers within this category. In 2005 the Home Oce oered a “best guess”
number between 310,000 and 570,000 irregular migrants in the UK. Without a
regularisation exercise, learning the breadth of undocumented migrants places of
origin would be even more dicult. In any case, their social and legal position is
one of almost total exclusion from rights and entitlements.
New citizens
A great many migrants become full citizens. During the 1990s around 40,000
people became citizens each year. This number has risen dramatically since
2000, with 2004 seeing a record number of 140,795 granted British citizenship
(The Guardian 18 May 2005). According to Home Oce estimates, 59% of the
foreign-born population who have been in the UK more than ve years – the
minimal stay to become eligible – have indeed become citizens.
In attempting to understand the nature and dynamics of diversity in Britain,
close attention must be paid to the stratied system of rights, opportunities, con-
straints and partial-to-full memberships that coincide with these and other immi-
grant categories (Morris 2002, 2004). And as pointed out by Lisa Arai (2006, p. 10),
There is a complex range of dierent entitlements, even within one
migrant status category (e.g. overseas students), and a lack of coherence or
rationale to a system developed ad hoc over many years, and which reects
competing pressures, such as whether to provide access to a service because
the individual needs it, or because it is good for society (e.g. pubic health).
Or whether to deny a service in order to protect public funds, ensure that
access does not prove an attraction for unwanted migrants or to appease
public opinion. This means that neither service providers, advice-giversnor
migrants themselves are clear as to what services they might be entitled.
Moreover – denoting a key feature of super-diversity – there may be widely
diering statuses within groups of the same ethnic or national origin. For
example, among Somalis in the UK – and in any single locality – we will nd
British citizens, refugees, asylum-seekers, persons granted exceptional leave to
32 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
remain, undocumented migrants, and people granted refugee status in another
European country but who subsequently moved to Britain. This fact under-
scores the point that simple ethnicity-focused approaches to understanding and
engaging various minority “communities” in Britain, as taken in many mod-
els and policies within conventional multiculturalism, is inadequate and often
inappropriate for dealing with individual immigrants’ needs or understanding
their dynamics of inclusion or exclusion.
Immigration status is not just a crucial factor in determining an individual’s
relation to the state, its resources and legal system, the labour market and other
structures. It is an important catalyst in the formation of social capital and a poten-
tial barrier to the formation of cross-cutting socio-economic and ethnic ties.
Many immigration statuses set specic time limits on people’s stay in Britain.
Most integration policies and programmes, in turn, do not apply to people with
temporary status. Temporary workers, undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers
often only spend short periods of time in given locations, either due to the search
for work or relocation by employers or authorities such as the National Asylum
Support Service. Short periods of duration may pose diculties not jus for them,
but for local institutions, such as schools (Ofsted 2003), to provide services.
In order to understand the nature and complexity of contemporary super-
diversity, we must examine how such a system of stratied rights and conditions
created by immigration channels and legal statuses cross-cuts socio-cultural and
socio-economic dimensions.
Gender
Over the past thirty years, more females than males migrated to the UK; since
about 1998, males have come to predominate in new ows. The reason for this,
Kyambi (2005) suggests, may be due to a general shift away from more female
oriented family migration to more male dominated work-based migration
schemes since 1995. It is likely also related to the inow of asylum-seekers, most
of whom have been male.
There is considerable variation of gender structures among dierent groups,
and this mostly relates to channels of migration and the evolution of migration
systems from particular countries of origin. For instance, 80% of Slovakians,
72% of Czechs, 71% of Filipinos, 70% of Slovenes, 68% of Thais and 67% of
Madagascars are women (GLA 2005a, p. 89). They are mostly to be found in
domestic or health services. Meanwhile, 71% of Algerians, 63% of Nepalese, 61%
of Kosovars, 61% of Afghans, 60% of Yemenis and 60% of Albanians are males,
almost all of whom are asylum-seekers (Ibid., p. 90).
Among migrants in London generally, women migrants have a far lower
employment rate (56%) than men (75%). Employment rates are especially low for
women born in South Asia (37%) and the Middle East and North Africa (39%)
(GLA 2005b, p. 2). Indeed many basic features of super-diversity – especially the
inter-related patterns surrounding immigrants’ country of origin, channels of
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 33
migration, employment, legal status and rights – tend to have highly gendered
patterns (cf. Kofman et al. 2005).
Age
The new immigrant population has a higher concentration of 25-44 year olds
and a lower proportion of under-16s than a decade ago, also perhaps reecting
a shift away from family migration (Kyambi 2005). Variance in age structure
among various ethnic groups reects dierent patterns of fertility and mortality
as well as migration (GLA 2005a, p. 6). The mean age of new immigrants is
28– averaging eleven years younger than the mean age of 39 for the British Isles
born population.
There is a considerable amount of diversity in the proportion of the new
immigrant population being in the age group 25-44, which we have
considered to be a primary working age. While Cyprus (31.03%), Hong
Kong (32.65%), Somalia (37.26%), Germany (37.85%), Norway (38.18%)
and Albania (38.56%) have the smallest fraction of their population fall-
ing within this age group, they are counterbalanced by Algeria (78.24%),
Philippines (74.49%), New Zealand (73.92%), and Italy (70.24%) with the
greatest proportions being 25-44 years old.
(Kyambi 2005, p. 133)
Space/place
New immigrants often settle in areas with established immigrant communities
from the same country of birth. Pointing to this fact, and by way of recognising
the boom in migrant-derived diversity, in 2005 The Guardian newspaper pub-
lished a special section called “London: the world in one city” which described and
mapped one hundred places and specic groups within “the most diverse city ever
(Benedictus and Godwin 2005). Another was published in January 2006 called
“The world in one country”, repeating the exercise on a national scale. These
special sections were revealing and celebratory, but were in many ways misleading.
The Greater London Authority’s analysis of the 2001 Census shows that
there are only a few common country of origin populations that are highly
concentrated in the capital – namely Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets (where
42% of the capital’s 35,820 Bangladeshis live), people from Sierra Leone living
in Southwark (26% of 3,647), Cypriots in Eneld (26% of 11,802), Afghanis in
Ealing (23% of 2,459) and Turks in Haringey (22% of 8,589). The report points
out that “although there are areas which have come to be associated with par-
ticular migrants, nearly all migrant groups tend to live in a number of dierent
boroughs” (GLA 2005a, p. 88).
Therefore, while The Guardian wished to highlight the cosmopolitan nature
of contemporary London and Britain, it made a mistake in suggesting certain
34 Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007)
groups are xed to certain places. Instead, as implied by the GLA analysis and
stressed by Geraldine Pratt (1998, p. 27),
there is deep suspicion about mapping cultures onto places, because mul-
tiple cultures and identities inevitably inhabit a single place (think of mul-
tiple identities performed under the roof of a family house) and a single
cultural identity is often situated in multiple, interconnected spaces.
London is the predominant locus of immigration and it is where super-diversity
is at its most marked. But, following Kyambi (2005), we should note that
increased diversication (of countries of origin, immigrant categories, etc.) are
not a matter of increased numbers but relative change in a given locality. A city
or neighbourhood may have small numbers of new migrants but relatively high
indices of diversity (cf. Allen and Turner 1989). In terms of numbers of new
migrants London still shows the highest degree of relative change, but signicant
trends are also to be found in the South East, West Midlands, East of England,
North West, and Yorkshire and Humberside (Kyambi 2005). A “diversity index”
recently created by the Oce for National Statistics – based on the probability of
two persons selected at random belonging to dierent ethnic groups – also shows
a high ethnic mix outside as well as within London (Large and Ghosh 2006).
One major avenue by which newcomers have come to places of previously low
immigrant density has been through government dispersal. In order to relieve
pressure on councils in London and the south-east of England, since 2000 the
National Asylum Support Service (NASS) has made considerable eort to disperse
people seeking asylum. By its peak in 2003 the dispersal system had spread 54,000
asylum-seekers to 77 local authorities across Britain, including several in Yorkshire
(18%), the West Midlands (18%), the north-west (18%) and Scotland (11%).
New immigrants with less established networks and patterns of settlement are
currently being drawn to locations with a wider range of employment opportu-
nities – principally to London but also to small towns and mid-sized cities (for
instance to work in construction), coastal and other leisure-centred localities
(where they might engage in hospitality and catering services) and rural areas
(usually for short-term jobs in agriculture and food processing).
Transnationalism
Perhaps throughout history, and certainly over the last hundred years or more,
immigrants have stayed in contact with families, organizations and communities
in their places of origin and elsewhere in the diaspora (Foner 1997, Morawska
1999, Glick Schiller 1999). In recent years, the extent and degree of transna-
tional engagement has intensied due in large part to changing technologies
and reduced telecommunication and travel costs. Enhanced transnationalism is
substantially transforming several social, political and economic structures and
practices among migrant communities worldwide (Vertovec 2004a).
Super-Diversity and its Implications (2007) 35
The “new immigrants” who have come to live in Britain over the past ten
years have done so during a period of increasingly normative transnationalism
(cf. Portes et al. 1999). Today in Britain, cross-border or indeed global patterns of
sustained communication, institutional linkage and exchange of resources among
migrants, homelands a