The smartphone is the new shtetl: technology is making integration harder

Telegraph

30-04-2025

Consider two Egyptians arriving in Britain: one in 1970, another in 2010. The former stepped off the plane into cultural exile. No Arabic TV, halal groceries were limited to a few parts of London, and there were no WhatsApp lifelines. Survival demanded immersion; you bartered broken English for bus directions, swapped Eid for fish-and-chip Fridays, diluted your identity to fit in. ' You either became British or you became invisible, ' a 1970s-era Egyptian shopkeeper told me at his London Middle Eastern grocery.
Fast-forward to my generation. When I landed in London in 2016, I brought Cairo with me. My phone buzzed with Al-Jazeera alerts, my laptop streamed Ramadan dramas, and Amazon Prime delivered molokhia (an iconic Egyptian stew) for Friday dinners. To many, work-from-home flexibility also meant biannual returns to Egypt – not pilgrimages, but extended coffee breaks. The pressure to assimilate? No such thing – that's 'racism.' The result? A generation of migrants who inhabit the West physically but not culturally. They may live here, but their hearts, minds and values remain tethered to foreign shores.
Technology didn't just ease migration – it neutered its transformative power. Algorithms feed immigrants the familiar, not the foreign. YouTube recommends extremist preachers from home, not BBC explainers on parliamentary democracy. TikTok's #ResistWest hashtags outcompete voting guides. ' The smartphone is the new shtetl,' as I argued at a hybrid threats symposium, 'building walls of comfort that breed contempt for the host culture.'
My counter-extremism research reveals a grim trend: second-generation immigrants, unmoored from their parents' struggles, cling to hyper-curated ancestral identities – distorted by online echo chambers.
Take Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber. His radicalisation fused familial ties to Libya's Islamic Fighting Group with encrypted ISIS propaganda. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 ringleader, was a Leeds native who was radicalised through UK-based cells preaching a warped 'clash of civilisations.'
These cases expose a brutal truth: when ancestral identity is algorithmically weaponised – elevated above British values by Silicon Valley code and state timidity – the social contract unravels. We are engineering our demise, trading shared liberty for tribal solitudes.
Integration isn't dead – it's been privatised. A choice few make, while most refuse to 'marry out' of their faith. My union with a British woman forced a reckoning: Sunday roasts replaced koshary Fridays, Adel Imam films swapped for Only Fools and Horses. Our children speak English, celebrate Bonfire Night, and inherit Judeo-Christian traditions. I let go of who I was as a teenager for who I want to be as a father, husband, and a British citizen.
As such, cross-cultural marriage is now the only effective assimilation tool. Yet most second-generation immigrants marry within their diaspora, creating self-contained communities that engage Britain transactionally – through schools, hospitals, Uber jobs – but rarely culturally.
This isn't just social theory – it's a national security tinderbox. For decades the UK has allowed immigration from the same countries to the same locations within the UK (specific neighbourhoods, boroughs and cities), creating clustered enclaves.
This, as extremism scholars argue, provides an environment, in the virtual and real worlds, that shares and supports one's extremism, which is crucial to maintaining and nurturing extremism. We now face an identity-driven cold war, heating by the day. When migrants no longer show an interest in belonging to their host nations, loyalty becomes negotiable. Why pledge allegiance to a country you've never truly joined?
The fix isn't just enhanced vetting and slashing immigration from high-risk states like Pakistan or Afghanistan – it's about reimagining integration. Denmark's 'ghetto laws,' which disperse ethnic enclaves, are harsh but work. Britain, however, remains shackled by Roy Jenkins's 1966 multicultural dogma. The late Home Secretary defined integration as 'equal opportunity with cultural diversity,' rejecting assimilation as 'a flattening process.'
His vision was dangerously naive. Consider Egypt: anti-Semitism is widespread, homosexuality is criminalised, and women's rights lag behind the West. This isn't 'diversity' to be celebrated – it's bigotry incompatible with British liberty.
True integration demands friction – the messy clash of traditions that forges new identities. We should mandate English fluency, incentivise mixed neighbourhoods, and dismantle clustered enclaves. We ought to celebrate cross-cultural unions that prioritise British values. We should expect migrants like me to abandon practices antithetical to liberal democracy or go home.