Kosovar migration to the United Kingdom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kosovar people in the United Kingdom
|
|---|
| Total population |
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Approximately 100,000 |
| Regions with significant populations |
| London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool |
| Languages |
| British English, some Albanian. |
| Religions |
| Orthodox, Muslim, Roman Catholic |
| Related ethnic groups |
| Kosovar people, Serbian British, Croatian British, Serbs, Montenegrins and Croats |
Kosovar migration to the United Kingdom refers to people from Kosovo settling in or temporarily living in the United Kingdom.
Contents |
[edit] Population and settlement
The earliest arrivals settled in London in the 1990s, with pockets of arrivals in other cities [1]. London local authorities regularly dispersed Kosovars to towns in Kent and elsewhere on the South Coast. As numbers grew, clusters of Kosovars could be found in towns near airports, coastal ports or near motorway stopping points. While not all Kosovars in the UK are refugees or asylum seekers, it is not clear what proportion of the population are migrants who have arrived through other immigration channels. However, there does not appear to be a distinct migrant community from Kosovo that is not linked with the volatile events of the 1990s.
The Kosovo Programme identified a number of centres to which evacuees would be sent, most in the North of England and Scotland, leading to a significant presence in towns such as Leeds and Glasgow. Since the introduction of the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) and the national dispersal system for asylum seekers, later arrivals from Kosovo have been distributed all over the UK. Since 2001, numbers as a whole have declined. In the North of England, some towns no longer have a significant Kosovar population, others have seen a movement towards their town by Kosovars initially sent to other towns in the area. Of the two thousand or so evacuees sent to Leeds, about two to three hundred people remain. Nearly all are concentrated in Leeds but some have settled in outlying towns such as Huddersfield. Approximately forty evacuees remain in Glasgow and eighty in Barrow-in-Furness. In London, Kosovars were predominantly settled in North London, but can now be found in all parts of the city where affordable housing is available.
