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........

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