Pauline Hanson’s recent visit to Tower Hamlets in East London with British right-wing figure Tommy Robinson was intended as a warning.

Surveying one of Britain’s largest Bangladeshi communities, the One Nation leader remarked that she “felt I was in another country”, arguing that Australia should avoid Britain’s path on immigration.

The imagery was familiar. Tower Hamlets has become shorthand in Britain’s polarised debate over multiculturalism, integration and national identity.

It occupies a similar symbolic place to Lakemba in Sydney, a suburb Hanson has previously criticised because of its large Muslim population and visible Islamic culture.

The comparison is politically effective. It is also misleading.

As an Australian of Bangladeshi heritage, I recognise many of the superficial similarities.

Brick Lane and Lakemba both function as gateway neighbourhoods. They provide newly arrived migrants with familiar languages, religious institutions, businesses and informal social networks.

Such ethnic concentrations are neither new nor uniquely Muslim. Irish, Italian and Chinese migrants all settled in comparable enclaves during earlier waves of migration.

The more interesting question is not why these neighbourhoods exist, but why they evolve so differently.

Britain’s postwar migration was largely shaped by labour shortages and imperial connections. Workers from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India were recruited into manufacturing, transport and heavy industry before family reunification consolidated those communities over several decades.

Residential concentration became increasingly entrenched, contributing to today’s debates over parallel societies and uneven economic opportunity.

Australia’s trajectory has been markedly different.

Since dismantling the White Australia policy in the 1970s, Australia has become one of the world’s most immigrant-rich societies. According to the OECD, 32.3 per cent of Australia’s population is now foreign-born, among the highest proportions in the developed world.

Yet Australia’s migration program has increasingly prioritised skilled migration, English proficiency and labour market participation, while humanitarian entrants remain a relatively small share of permanent migration.

Lakemba is a symbol of a very different immigration model. Photo: AAP

That distinction is more than administrative. Migration policy is also economic policy.

Australia’s points-based selection system has generally sought migrants who can integrate rapidly into the labour market and fill skills shortages.

OECD analysis suggests that skilled migrants contribute positively to labour productivity and innovation, with firm-level productivity gains particularly evident where skilled migration is concentrated.

Economic integration often precedes social integration.

Highly educated migrants tend to experience greater occupational mobility and, over time, greater residential mobility. Their children disperse geographically, attend university in large numbers and increasingly form families across ethnic boundaries.

The result is that suburbs such as Lakemba frequently function less as permanent ethnic enclaves than as transitional communities, continually replenished by new arrivals while earlier generations move elsewhere across metropolitan Sydney.

This should not invite complacency. Australia’s housing shortages, infrastructure pressures and rapid post-pandemic population growth have intensified public scrutiny of immigration.

Questions surrounding English-language acquisition, visa compliance, civic integration and social cohesion deserve serious consideration.

Democracies cannot simply dismiss public concerns as xenophobia without undermining confidence in the migration system itself.

Hanson has correctly identified that immigration debates have shifted from simply asking how many migrants countries should admit to asking how immigration shapes national cohesion. That is an important political development.

Yet Britain and Australia begin from different institutional foundations.

Tower Hamlets reflects Britain’s imperial legacy, industrial labour markets and long history of family-chain migration.

Lakemba reflects an immigration system that, despite its imperfections, has generally remained more selective and economically oriented.

The distinction matters because public debates increasingly rely on visual symbolism rather than structural analysis.

A crowded high street lined with halal butchers or Bengali restaurants tells us relatively little about long-term integration.

Measures of educational attainment, employment, residential mobility, intermarriage and income growth provide far more useful indicators of whether migrants are becoming part of the national mainstream.

The broader lesson extends beyond Australia and Britain. Across advanced economies, governments are attempting to reconcile two competing realities.

Ageing populations and persistent skills shortages create strong economic demand for migration, while voters increasingly demand confidence that immigration strengthens rather than fragments national identity.

Those objectives need not be incompatible.

Australia’s experience suggests that careful migrant selection, robust labour market participation and clear expectations around civic integration can produce a multicultural society characterised by considerable upward mobility rather than enduring segregation.

That achievement remains incomplete and should not be romanticised.

Tower Hamlets deserves attention because it illustrates what can happen when economic, residential and cultural separation reinforce one another across generations.

Lakemba, by contrast, demonstrates a more dynamic model in which ethnic concentration often marks the beginning of integration rather than its endpoint.

The lesson for policymakers is therefore neither to celebrate diversity uncritically nor to fear it reflexively.

It is to recognise that the long-term success of immigration depends less on where migrants first settle than on whether institutions enable them—and their children—to move beyond those first neighbourhoods.