ABSTRACT
The relationship between the labour market and South Asian settlers in Britain has been an area of political and academic concern since the first wave of mass migration in the early sixties. The initial concentration of Black workers in manual and semi-skilled occupations was a result of the needs of capital for cheap labour. The socio-economic position of Black workers in Britain, at that time, is explained in terms of an 'underclass' or of a class fraction. Structuralist explanations of the occupational position and general socioeconomic status of South Asian migrants and their offspring can be divided into theoretical and empirical sections. Class is also a concern for those who have studied Britain's minorities from an anthropological perspective and who have not been overtly concerned with macro processes. To describe how the category of Kashmiri/Pakistani labour comes into being requires an analysis which can take into account the history of colonialism and how it affects the migration process.
