YOU whiteys think we Asians are all the same”, a friend once told me in exasperation.

That was 20 years ago, yet even now there’s still a tendency to view those of Asian heritage as coming from similar circumstances and enjoying similar levels of prosperity, qualifications and so on.

But the latest figures from the 2011 Census show this isn’t necessarily so.

Of the 39,100 people in the borough from south Asia, about 19,800 came from India, 17,800 from Pakistan and 1,500 from Bangladesh.

The incentive for many migrants was the same – they came to work in the textile mills, invited in by Lancashire mill-owners facing a labour shortage in the late 50s and early 60s.

Their backgrounds were, however, different. The Indians largely came from the State of Gujarat, and within that state and in the British colonies in Africa, many had been successful businesspeople. Those from Pakistan, on the other hand, tended to come from rural villages. These are generalisations and there are exceptions. But look at the latest census data.

The homes of nearly half (48 per cent) of Indian-heritage households are owned outright compared with a third (33.5 per cent) of Pakistani-heritage households, much the same as that of the white population (30.3 per cent).

For single parent families, the proportion is around one in eight for both white and Pakistani populations (13.1 per cent and 12.6 per cent respectively), while it’s one in 13 (7.4 per cent) for Indian families.

These differences are also reflected in other data on school performance – in 2013 70 per cent of Indian-heritage pupils in the area got five or more A* to C grades in GCSE (including English and maths) compared to 60 per cent of white pupils and 55 per cent of Pakistani-heritage pupils.

Far from being “all the same”, the message from these and many other indicators is that we’re all different – regardless of the colour of our skin or our religion.