Like other metropolitan centers in Britain, Manchester has absorbed waves of immigration over the centuries. Manchester, one of England’s biggest metropolitan areas, is home to the largest Jewish community in the country outside London, numbering around 30,000 people. They live in the city alongside an even larger population that identifies as Muslim, which makes up one-fifth of the city’s 550,000 citizens. When Uganda, a former British protectorate, expelled Asian residents in 1972, Britain decided it had a responsibility to welcome them. And the diversity of the city’s population has drawn people from many more countries to make their homes there.
