Ukrainian Refugees Fleeing War Scared of Living in Multicultural England

{snip}

An exposé report released this week from the British state-owned Channel 4 broadcaster on the status of the integration of Ukrainian refugees in the UK revealed that some of those forced to flee their country as a result of the war with Russia were shocked and even frightened by the ethnic makeup of the parts of England they found themselves living in, namely the paucity of native English people.

“Just over a hundred thousand Ukrainians have sought refuge in the UK – the vast majority of them women and children. But not all of them have found it easy to settle into a country where the ethnic diversity and cultural values are very different from what they’ve been used to back home,” the broadcaster reported.

Speaking to Channel 4’s communities editor Darshna Soni, a Birmingham woman who opened her house to a refugee under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, said that the refugee mother told her that she wanted to leave the area as it was dangerous because there were “too many Muslims and too many people with different skin colours”.

The Ukrainian mother also was fearful of sending her son to the local school in which the “majority of children happened to be black and Asian” and because there were “not enough white kids”.

{snip}

The public broadcaster then interviewed Oksana, a refugee who said that she had come from the “best part of Kyiv (Kiev) to the worst area of Birmingham,” and that she was concerned over potential Islamic terrorism.

Channel 4’s Darshna Soni told the refugee that “lots of people here would feel very offended” because she was implying that Birmingham was not safe because it was racially “mixed”.

Oksana bluntly replied that her view was not from a position of ignorance, and that she had in fact “read police statistics”, had read news reports in English, and had heard “so many dangerous stories” from locals about Islamic terrorism and violence.

{snip}