There are now more than four million non-white Britons - more than the population of the Republic of Ireland. So it is not surprising that rather than a single 'ethnic minority experience' of life in Britain in 2001 there is a complex pattern of opportunity and disadvantage with as many differences within and between different ethnic groups as can be found by comparing the 'ethnic minorities' to the general population.
What can be said of the ethnic minority groups as a whole is that they tend to be considerably younger than the population at large - the median age of whites is 37, that of Afro-Caribbeans 33, Indians 31 and Bangladeshis 18 - while the heavy clustering of 'ethnic communities' has made multiculturalism in Britain largely an English urban question.
Almost half of all ethnic minority Britons live in London. Much debate focuses on the 300 languages spoken in the capital's schools, and the unique mixture of cultural assets and social problems this creates for the 'global city'. Inner London is the only part of the country where black Britons outnumber British Asians, by almost two to one, while British Indians predominate in outer London suburbs such as Harrow.
While projections suggest that the current census will confirm Newham and Brent as London's first boroughs with non-white majorities, Britain's ethnic communities all live in mixed areas. Southall's Sikhs, Leicester's Hin dus and Brixton's black populations live in areas with white majorities - Leicester, for example, is 70 per cent white - giving the race map of Britain's cities a very different pattern from the de facto racial segregation (and 'zipcode apartheid') of US cities.
Racial tensions have been greatest this year not in the areas with the largest ethnic populations but in north-west towns - Oldham, Burnley, Rochdale and Blackburn - which contain very high levels of internal ethnic segregation. In Rochdale, 96 per cent of the Pakistani community and 89 per cent of Bangladeshis live in the five inner wards, among the most deprived areas in the North-West.
Pakistanis are the group least likely to live in the capital and form the largest ethnic group in the North-West, Yorkshire and Scotland, while British Indians are the largest ethnic group in both the West and East Midlands, as well as in most of the predominantly white regions of England.
The relatively even dispersal of the 149,000 Chinese Britons may further add to their near invisibility in discussion about race in Britain. But this may simply be a positive sign that they have little to worry about. Britons of Chinese origin, along with African-Asians, can no longer be considered disadvantaged groups - both men and women achieve similar earnings to their white counterparts, and are as, or even more likely, to be in professional and managerial jobs.
This experience is shared with the growing British Indian and Afro-Caribbean middle-classes, but is not true for these groups as a whole. By many measures, the Afro-Caribbean community is the most 'integrated', with easily the highest levels of inter-racial marriages (eight times higher than those for blacks in the United States), while Afro-Caribbean women are doing relatively well in terms of employment and income. But with greater levels of unemployment and one in three Afro-Caribbean children in a single-parent family, there is a high level of child poverty.
British Indians are, on average, slightly better off than white Britons, but there is a relatively high inequality within the group, particularly among women.
Worst-off are people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin who score poorly on all main indicators of social exclusion and disadvantage - they are easily the most likely to be unemployed, living in poverty or overcrowded housing, and with lower levels of fluency in English than other ethnic groups, especially among women.
If education is the key to opportunity and mobility, then many positive developments might be expected. Most ethnic groups are over-represented among Britain's undergraduates, even though these are largely concentrated at the new universities. Children of black African origin, like those of Indian origin, achieve above-average school results.
The low figure of GCSE passes for Afro-Caribbeans is similar to that for white working-class boys. It is difficult to disentangle the effects of race and class, although ethnic minority students eligible for free school meals outperform their white counterparts. Whether girls outperforming boys at GCSEs across all ethnic groups - and Pakistani and Bangladeshi women are as likely to stay in education after 16 as their white counterparts - will change gender relations is a bigger question.
The problem is that similar, or better, levels of education and skills for almost all ethnic groups have not translated into equality in the world of work. Higher graduate unemployment and lower wages than for similarly qualified whites suggests continued racial disadvantage, perhaps more institutional than overt. The political, legal and business establishment remains largely white.
Scarcity of detailed data has long been a problem. Major leaps forward include the addition of ethnic data for the first time in the 1991 census, and this year's changes to include the estimated 240,000 mixed race Britons who were previously officially invisible. While some have questioned the motives for this - especially for example, the crime data which showed that blacks commit more muggings, whites more burglaries and Asians more white collar crime - there remain many significant omissions. A government which has made getting the UK online a priority currently collects no information on ethnicity and internet access, making it impossible to assess whether this may be a factor in the 'digital divide'. And the cost of analysing the specific experiences of ethnic groups means there is often little detailed analysis - for example, on the experiences of non-English speaking women in the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities, or on the education of Romany traveller children, believed by educational researchers to have the lowest levels of qualification and the highest rates of exclusion.
Britain's ethnic minorities are clearly here to stay and are increasingly visible. And the worst form of exclusion may be not to be part of the picture at all.