Washington, Aug 22 (IANS) Pakistani Americans generally believe that sinister plots like the foiled London plan to blow up US-bound planes could not be hatched here, at least not now, the New York Times said.

This is so because of differences that have made Pakistanis in the US far better off economically and more assimilated culturally than their counterparts in Britain, the daily said in a report from Chicago Monday.

But some Pakistani immigrants do not rule out the possibility, given how little is understood about the exact tipping point that pushes angry young Muslim men to accept an ideology that endorses suicide and mass murder, it said.

The idea of a relatively smaller, more prosperous, more striving immigrant community inoculating against terror cells goes only so far, they say.

"It makes it sound like it couldn't happen here because we are the good immigrants: hard-working, close-knit, educated," the Times cited Junaid Rana, an assistant professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an American-born son of Pakistani immigrants. "But we are talking about a cult mind-set, how a cult does its brainwashing."

Yet one major difference between the US and Britain, some say, is the United States' historical ideal of being a melting-pot meritocracy.

"You can keep the flavour of your ethnicity, but you are expected to become an American," said Omer Mozaffar, 34, a Pakistani-American raised here who is working toward a doctorate in Islamic studies at the University of Chicago. Britain remains far more rigid.

Hard numbers on how many people of Pakistani descent live in the United States do not exist, but a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press on charitable donations among Pakistani-Americans, "Portrait of a Giving Community," puts the number around 500,000, with some 35 percent or more of them in the New York metropolitan area.

Chicago has fewer than 100,000, while other significant clusters exist in California, Texas and Washington, D.C.

Pakistani immigration to the US surged after laws in the 1960s made it easier for Asians to enter the country. Most were drawn by jobs in academia, medicine and engineering.

It was only in the late 1980s and 90s that Pakistanis arrived to work blue-collar jobs as taxi drivers or shopkeepers, said Adil Najam, the author of the book on donations and an international relations professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

In Britain, by comparison, the first Pakistanis arrived after World War II to work in factories. Many were fleeing sectarian strife in Kashmir - a lingering source of resentment - and entire communities picked up and resettled together.

This created Pakistani ghettos in cities like Bradford and Birmingham, whereas in the United States immigrants tended to be scattered and newcomers forced to assimilate. The trends intensified with time.

Unlike the situation in Britain, there is no collective history here of frustrated efforts to assimilate into a society where a shortened form of Pakistani is a stinging slur, and there are no centuries-old grievances nursed from British colonial rule over what became Pakistan.

Where such comparisons fail, however, is in providing a model to predict why some young Muslims turn to violence, although no religion is immune, the New York Times said. In the United States there have been a few cases of young Pakistani men being arrested or tried in terror plots, in Atlanta and in Lodi, California, for example.

A more important factor in determining who becomes a militant is most likely the feeling of being stigmatised as less than equal, community activists say, noting that such discrimination remains far more common in Britain.

The attitude of the American government in adopting terms like "Islamic fascists" and deporting large numbers of immigrants makes Muslims feel marked, as if they do not belong here, according to Abdul Qadeer Sheikh, a bookseller in Chicago.

"The society in the United States is much fairer to foreigners than anywhere else," he said, "but that mood is changing," the New York Times quoted him as saying.