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UK's Asians reaching top jobs faster: Study
The survey said while African, Indian and Chinese obtain success faster than whites, Bangladeshi and Pakistanis fared much worse, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.
Many of Britain's younger generation of ethnic minorities have broken class barriers and now get managerial jobs faster than their white counterparts, according to research on Monday.
Educational achievements have helped the offspring of working-class parents in the Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese communities to obtain professional positions, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.
The exceptions to this were youngsters from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities who showed less upward mobility then children from white manual workers' families.
"There is good news to the extent that a disproportionate number of the young people who are upwardly mobile are the children of parents who come to this country as migrants," the study's author Lucinda Platt said.
The study supports the view that immigrants often experience a drop in their socio-economic class when they arrive in Britain, but often have high aspirations for their children to better their relative ranking.
It said the class disadvantages of the children of Pakistani immigrants could not be explained by differences in family backgrounds or education, factors which did help explain the difficulty for the offspring of Bangladeshi migrants to be more upwardly mobile.
"We need to do much more to understand why this is happening and the extent to which factors such as racial discrimination are involved," Platt a Sociology lecturer from the University of Essex said in a statement.
She said location could also play a part, particularly if certain ethnic groups lived in areas where there were few economic opportunities.
Looking at different religious groups, the study found that second-generation Jews and Hindus tended to get ahead more than their Christian counterparts. Muslims and Sikhs were less likely to have moved into a higher socio-economic group.
The study was based on surveys that traced the progress of 1,40,000 children over 30 years.
