In an upstairs room at the Jagonari women's centre in east London, six women in colourful headscarves grin as an instructor enunciates simple English phrases from a whiteboard. The women are mostly new immigrants from Bangladesh, who are being taught English as part of the centre's "positively integrated" programme. In other classes they will learn how to deal with doctors, police officers and council officials, how to use public transport and how to claim benefits. The idea is to help them find their way around British society-and eventually find jobs. Britain's 450,000 Bangladeshis and 1.1m Pakistanis, who began to arrive in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, suffer from a huge penalty that is partly self-imposed.
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