TKJ,
I have some friends in UK, from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and they all have negative opinions of the "Asian" community in general but Bangladeshis and Sri Lankan people specifically. In America, we mean East Asians when we say Asians, but when people in UK say it, they refer to Southwestern Asians.
It's interesting that these Brits I've spoken to, don't agree on much but they agree that they don't like people from that region.
Intrigued me because it's not for the typical reasons that people would dislike a new ethnic group....like street crimes,etc. In America ...Indians, and by extension..others from the region, generally do exceptionally well in school, are high achievers and are viewed more favorably than other immigrant groups.
My UK buddies all say that Bang. and Sri refuse to assimilate and close themselves off from general society.
A few years back me and a couple of friends went on a trip to London (a friend of mine has family living over there). We were in a shopping street and me and two others went inside a store, while there were two of us that wanted to stay outside to smoke a cigarette. All of the sudden, when the three of us walked back out of the store, we saw that there were two Bangladeshis attempting to mug the other two friends that waited outside the store. One of them even pulled out the most pathetic knife I've ever seen in my entire life. A friend of mine, apparently unaware of the dangers, immediately ran to the guy with the knife and smashed him in the side of his face pummeling him to the ground. Thankfully, a security guard, a black Jamaican man, also saw what happened and came to us. The two muggers took off and ran away, while the security guard called someone (don't think he called the police, I think he was calling other guards to look out for them). True story.
With Sri Lankans there's no religion that plays into role, but a lot of the young Sri Lankans, especially a few years back, still had an absolute tribal mentality. There were a load of feuds going on between Sri Lankan youngsters, leading to vicious fights, sometimes involving samurai swords. In some cases with fatal results. I've never heard they bother a lot of people outside their own community though, but between each other there have been nasty feuds going on.
A lot of Asians in London and elsewhere in the UK tend to concentrate and keep to their own community. That's true for the Muslim groups such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but it's the same for Indians (especially the ones coming from a Sikh background) and Sri Lankan Tamils (a Hindu group). And that's fine, a lot of working class whites, Turks, Albanians, Chinese,...all tend to stick to their own community. But the thing, especially with Bangladeshis, is that they're all extremely concentrated in a few neighborhoods (Tower Hamlets in East London for instance) where they're an extreme nuissance for anyone passing though that isn't like them. There are even unofficial Sharia courts operating in neighborhoods with a large Bangladeshi contigent. Of course, I'm sure not all of them are like that. But while I've heard in quite a lot of cases of friendly interaction between native whites, blacks, Turks, Chinese, Albanians,...and even Indians and Pakistanis, I've never heard that when it comes to Bangladeshis. Nobody seems to like them, not even the Pakistanis.
