Yes, it is. However, what most people don't realise is that about a third of the population were originally London overspill. There are quite large Chinese and Pakistani/Bangladeshi minorities, who have nothing to do with the university, hospital or IT and pharma companies. It's also used to tourists, speaking many languages and wearing different clothes, and foreign students at the language schools. UKIP has never taken hold.
Boston is not that far away, but it's completely different - a sleepy East Anglian town, which relies on agriculture. I remember listening to local radio broadcasts, when the farmers complained that they had crops rotting in the fields, because they couldn't employ enough people to pick them. It used to have a fishing industry, but it's now virtually disappeared. It was a town which the late twentieth centruy passed by. Immigration has resulted in regeneration, but the locals don't see it like that:
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/boston-how-a-lincolnshire-town-became-the-most-divided-place-in-england-a6838041.html
The point I'm trying to make is that immigrants can't be lumped together as having the same needs or causing the same issues.
Trevor Phillips, former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: “Integration doesn’t happen by accident – you have to work at it. If we want to avoid a slow descent into mutual bigotry, we need to drop the dogma, stop singing kumbaya to each other, weigh the evidence without sentiment, recognise the reality, and work out a programme – both symbolic and practical – to change the reality.”
My understanding of that is that we can't just say that immigration doesn't matter and brush the whole thing under the carpet. Nevertheless, racism must never be excused and there are solutions.
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