The Church's response to immigration in recent years has drawn heavily upon the call to welcome and treat the stranger as if you have Christ in your midst. This is absolutely right, yet we also have to question whether the unprecedented levels of immigration that we are now seeing can truly contribute to the “common good” - another theme the churches have emphasised in their teaching on social justice.

The facts are simple. Immigration has tripled in the past ten years. The Government predicts that, over the next 25 years, immigration will add seven million to the population of England - seven times the present population of Birmingham.

For years it has been impossible to question the wisdom of large-scale immigration without being branded a “racist”. This lack of respect for others' views has suffocated healthy debate while providing grist for extremists. Many people ask: “Who is listening to our concerns?”

And it is easy to see why they are concerned. The British people are not racist. They know the benefits that migration has brought to our country down the centuries. But they see society changing before their eyes, like a film that has been speeded up. For example, 25 per cent of UK births are to women born abroad. There are at present 1,338 schools where at least 51 per cent of pupils do not have English as their first language. At a third of schools in Leicester and Blackburn, the majority of pupils do not have English as their first language.

Behind these facts is an unprecedented turnover of population. Last year alone about 600,000 people arrived in the UK while 400,000 left. With a turnover of a million people in one year, no wonder many people sense that the glue that binds our society together is weakening. It takes time for people of different cultures to get accustomed to each others' ways and, regrettably, not all newcomers are committed to integration. Some are not even sure about the democratic values that are the very foundation of our society.

I am not the first to note this. Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has spoken courageously of our society “sleepwalking into segregation” and of “a kind of cold war in some parts of the country”. His warning has been echoed by the House of Commons Local Government and Communities Select Committee. This summer it reported that “migration has become the single greatest public concern in Britain”, and that “community cohesion cannot be improved without addressing and alleviating public concerns about migration”.

This issue is not going to go away. We need a commonsense agreement that maintains a competitive labour market while stabilising the population. It is not enough to hope that the numbers will fall. It is the Government's duty to ensure that they do. That's why I and a number of other parliamentarians launched a cross-party group this week to call for balanced migration.

This is certainly not a proposal to “chuck 'em out”, as David Aaronovitch claimed yesterday. The principle - emigration equals immigration - means that people from abroad could work here for four years, meeting our economic needs.

The asylum system could remain substantially unchanged; those granted asylum or other humanitarian protection nowadays amount to only 3 per cent of foreign immigration. The heart of the proposal is that migrants from outside the EU - who constitute by far the majority of immigrants - who want to settle here permanently would have to apply for permission within an annual quota. There would be a cap on the numbers allowed to settle permanently in the UK.

Some have labelled these proposals as “xenophobic”. They are nothing of the kind. A YouGov poll found that 75 per cent of black and minority ethnic respondents wanted much lower immigration, of whom 36 per cent supported balanced migration and 39 per cent wanted even tougher limits. Are they xenophobic too?

Our critics must answer some obvious questions. How will England cope if the present predicted levels of large-scale immigration take place? If this scale of immigration continues, with people of different faiths, cultures and traditions coming here, what will it mean to be British?

There is deep visceral distress, bordering on anger, among many British people of all colours concerning migration. We have seen how this can spill over into violence in European countries such as France, the Netherlands and Denmark. It would be arrogant to assume that this could never happen in Britain. We must turn a potential crisis into a creative approach that deepens our sense of community and nationhood.

The Balanced Migration group provides us with a much needed opportunity to have a calm debate and build a consensus. Immigration must be brought under control if we are to retain the essentials of British society that have been built up over the generations. To the children and grandchildren of all Britons, no matter when they came to this country, we owe nothing less.

Lord Carey of Clifton is the former Archbishop of Canterbury

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