The migrant labour force has become the lifeblood of hotels and hospitals throughout Britain. In Peterborough, illegal farmhands working below minimum wage for Indian gangmasters dig for onions. Some 30 Chinese illegal workers smuggled into Britain by snakehead gangs from Fujian were caught in a tidal bore in Morecambe Bay while picking cockles last February, 20 drowned. The restaurant business is swarming with illegal workers, most of them are South Asians and Chinese. There are some 8,000 plus Indian restaurants, half of them located in London. But crackdowns in the cities are pushing many illegal workers to rural areas. As elsewhere, Nepalis flock to where there is already a concentration of fellow Nepalis, leading to a build-up of little Nepals up and down the country. They intermingle only with fellow Nepalis or other South Asians. The educated young work as waiters in Indian and Bangladeshi eateries. Those with poor English skills throng restaurant kitchens. And the rest (like newly married women who come to England as spouses of ?students?) end up cleaning hospital facilities. The Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading City alone employs over 100 Nepalis, mostly women, as cleaners. ?The number could be anywhere up to 150 people. And that is just one little hospital in the south of England,? says Krishna Dhakal, a registered ?full-time student? in a computer training institute who works 70 hours a week as a cleaner in the hospital. Due to the lack of legal protection and official recognition, the newly arrived illegal Nepalis have no option but to seek integration into their own close-knit community. ?The space to manoeuvre in British society is nonexistent when you are a Nepali, especially when you expect to start a new life in England based on who you know rather than what you know?, says Subindra Bogati, a documentary film maker and international relations scholar. For a greenhorn like Krishna Dhakal, there is little else to do than follow ?what everyone does?, register for a course in a shady college like University Tutorial College in Reading City that charges 500 pounds a year and sells enrolment papers, get the visa extended as a student and keep working in a hospital without going to college in the hope of striking it rich some day. The idea of ethnic integration that Tony Blair?s liberal left government tries so hard to apply couldn?t be more remote in this underground migrant community. A Pakistani sticks with Pakistanis, a Bengali will not have anything to do with the rest, the Indians do not venture anywhere else other than their restaurants and their ramshackle houses. The Nepalis are busy eking out a living but still have time to backbite and categorise themselves just as they do back home even though they are all in the same boat, being exploited by gangmasters. Reading City?s 500 plus Nepalis have set up two separate communities segregated along ethnic lines. As with other South Asians, ethnic division seems to become more pronounced when abroad. Bahuns, Chhetris and Newars celebrated Dasain with the Reading Nepali Society UK and the rest (mainly Rais and Gurungs) bond together in the Tamaudhi Reading Nepali Society. Marko Bojcun, professor and expert in east-west migration patterns in Western Europe says, ?When you don?t know what your rights as a migrant worker are, you get tossed and kicked around, exploited and oppressed.? Kamal Bastola, a Jhapa resident guts ducks for Peter Ricketts, an infamous gangmaster in Norfolk. He works 16 hour shifts, bent double. He paid Rs 600,000 to a human trafficker in Maharajganj to get smuggled into the UK via Saudi Arabia and Algeria. The final stretch was a horrendous ordeal in which he had to travel as a stowaway in a freight train across France. Immigrant hotspots like Reading and Norfolk are under constant surveillance by the Home Office. But with only 193 full-time immigration enforcement officers, the ministry is overstretched to crush the network of traffickers and illegal farmhand employers. The government is all too aware of the ground situation, but seems to be able to do little more than get the media to accompany them on occasional immigration raids. Meanwhile in farms, factories, hotels and hospitals across Britain, South Asians refuse to talk to each other, let alone integrate into British society. Indians continue to dig dikes and work in hideous factories for less than 2.50 pounds an hour. Pakistanis are actively setting up corner shops and grocery stores in their own ghettos. Bengalis are busy importing brides. And Nepalis stick to their own divided ethnicities, while working at Indian restaurants.