Key findings

• • Immigration and family-building have contributed to the rapid growth of Scotland's minority ethnic groups who, by 2011, numbered 850,000, or 16 per cent of Scotland's residents.

• • The largest minority is ‘White: Other British’ numbering 417,000 in 2011, an increase of 10 per cent over the decade. About three-quarters of this group were born in England.

• • Each minority group increased its population during the last decade.

• • The African population grew rapidly, from 5,000 in 2001 to 30,000 in 2011. This growth was mainly from immigration, and was focused on areas beyond those where African people had mainly lived before.

• • Other minority populations also dispersed across Scotland during the decade, growing faster outside of those areas in which they were most likely to be resident in 2001. The one exception is the Chinese population that has grown most in the student areas near universities where it was already concentrated.

• • Change in the census question itself has added diversity, now identifying the Polish population, for example. At 61,000, they are the second largest minority in 2011.

• • One in six of Scotland's households of two or more people have more than one ethnicity represented.

• • Individuals with a ‘Mixed or multiple’ ethnic group number 20,000 people, or 0.4 per cent of the population.

• • Over half of Scotland's residents in 2011 who were born outside the UK had arrived in 2004 or more recently. Immigration has increased more rapidly in Scotland in the past decade than in the rest of Britain.

• • Scotland's diversity has increased both overall and in every local authority district. All of Edinburgh's population and two-thirds of Glasgow's population live in wards that are more diverse than Scotland as a whole. Both have become more diverse, and their diversity has spread more evenly through their cities, as it has through Scotland as a whole.

Introduction

It has been recognised for some time that there are distinctive aspects to ethnic diversity in Scotland. The reasons for this are, in no small part, historical: significant Irish immigration to Scotland in the 19th century, especially to the west of Scotland, created a large migrant labour force, as did the migration southwards of displaced Highlanders who were seen as being culturally, if not ‘racially’, distinct by lowland Scots.