Writing in the Times, Lord Carey explains why he has signed up to a call for restrictions on immigration:

“The sheer numbers of migrants … threaten the very ethos or DNA of our nation…. Democratic institutions such as the monarchy, Parliament, the judiciary, the Church of England, our free press and the BBC … support the liberal democratic values of the nation. Some groups of migrants, however, are ambivalent about or even hostile to such institutions. The proposed antiwar Islamist march in Wootton Bassett is a clear example of the difficulties extremists pose to British society.

“Furthermore, the idea that Britain can continue to welcome with open arms immigrants who immediately establish their own tribunals to apply Sharia, rather than make use of British civil law, is deeply socially divisive.”

See also the Daily Mail. And the Daily Express, which headlines its story “Let Christian migrants in first, demands Carey”.

Update:  See “The church fights back against Islamification” by Damian Thompson, editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, who writes:

“We have had to wait decades for this moment, but it has finally happened. A leading British clergyman has said something sensible about immigration…. Politicised Islam is at the forefront of his mind: he knows that Britain’s evangelical Christians are fed up with being told to develop ever closer ties with their Muslim neighbours…. In the long term, the future of Western civilisation can be secured only by an alliance between Christians and secularists against the totalitarian ideology of Islamism. That is a strange prospect; and even more uncomfortable is the realisation that Christianity’s survival as a mass movement may depend on something as prosaic as immigration control. But that is surely what Lord Carey is hinting at, and it is brave of him to do so.”

Further update:  See also “Damian Thompson on the ‘Islamification’ of Britain”, ENGAGE, 8 January 2010