Are liberals less pro-immigration than traditionally?

Cultural studies; from John Lloyd in the FT:

A cultural movement is happening within liberal opinion. It no longer greets immigrants with open arms. They are welcome – but with tighter conditions, aimed at encouraging, even mandating, integration. The old, cross-party order that strove to see immigration “not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” – in the words of the late Roy Jenkins, a Labour home secretary in the mid-1960s – has been diluted. All these orotund concepts – assimilation, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance – are now in contest. The growing opposition, especially among Labour’s key working and lower middle class supporters, to the huge surge that saw some 1m people given legal residence in the UK in the past decade, according to endlessly contested government figures, is too great to ignore.

This political shift has now spilled into Britain’s most important cultural institution, the BBC. ...

Now comes a larger revision: a “White” season of programmes, stretching across the next two weeks on BBC2, which includes Last Orders, a lyrical evocation of a dying working men’s club; Rivers of Blood, a sympathetic analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech of 40 years ago, prophesying violent ethnic conflict; All White in Barking, an account of the high-immigration east London suburb, whose central character, Dave, a BNP activist, is evenly portrayed; and The Poles are Coming, a vision of Peterborough as a city that has become semi-Polish, or “swamped” as some of its older citizens see it. Any one of these programmes would probably not have been aired three years ago. They would certainly not have been combined in a season the existence of which is at least a partial “sorry not to have paid you more attention” gesture.

Richard Klein, the initiator and commissioning editor for the series, says: “I feel the white working class has been ignored by the political classes. They feel the pressure of ‘political correctness’ – and the BBC has been one of these pressures. ... I think there has been a loss of nerve in the past to grapple with challenging issues”.