The Asian immigrants of Bradford and Oldham may not come from an officially enforced ghetto but they do come from villages where extended family, not to say racial and cultural homogeneity, are the only context in which daily life is intelligible. To accuse them of failing to "integrate" - which is to say, to forsake their communal security - is quite unforgivably stupid and insensitive. They abandoned their home countries to avail themselves of the opportunities that another place had to offer - as my family did - but the transplantation itself will have taken almost all the courage and initiative that any human being can summon up in a lifetime. Leave them alone to make what they can of the new life with whatever familiar comforts they require. They are not the problem. It is their children who are the problem.

As I said, when I was a child it was my parents' generation who were the translators: they were the bridge between the foreign grandparents and the quintessentially American grandchildren. What happened to them to make them so comfortably bilingual and bicultural? What happened was that they went to common-or-garden American state schools where they were taught English (rigorously in those days, with no nonsense about concessions to other native languages), and inculcated with a profound sense of pride in their American identity.

That did not just mean, as many British cynics seem to think, that they were forced to salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance every day (although they did that, as did I). It meant that they were taught the meaning of their Constitution and the values which it was designed to protect. They learned by heart the essential passages of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution (which begins "We the people"). Most particularly, they learned to understand why their own parents had risked so much to give them a life in a new, free country.