It' true that the censorship has been lifted somewhat in recent years as people have grown tired of being automatically being called a racist and a bigot if they don't agree with politically correct views on immigration but if you think over the past few decades we have been able to have an open conversation about immigration and multiculturalism then frankly you must be living on another planet.
Perhaps the misunderstanding is with the word 'open'. Sure, we have been able to talk about immigration as much as we like, you can talk about how foreigners enrich our country and how you love immigration and how it gives you the chance to experience other cultures etc etc. But as soon as you do anything more than tentatively criticize immigration on economic grounds, you run the risk of being labelled a racist and a bigot which is, of course, social suicide.
Acceptance of foreigners has became a measuring stick used to measure peoples moral worth. There has been an unspoken agreement that those who argue against immigration are old fashioned, bigoted racists whose irrational hatred of foreign people drive their anti immigration views (even if they may try to hide it), while those who are pro-immigration are modern, vibrant, progressive, open-minded people who should be applauded and admired. This is why issues regarding immigration and racism tend to cause a much larger public outcry compared to other issues, it gives British people a chance to show off to others how much of a good person they are.
You mean... social attitudes have moved on and being openly nasty about foreigners or black and brown people isn't the done thing anymore? Sounds like a sense of nationality that goes beyond ethnicity or religion to me. Aren't you meant to be for that sort of thing?
Immigration IS a neutral discussion
Neutral to whom? Certainly it is not at the level of practical politics, where it all too often is a proxy for race (yeah, go ahead and deny that), and absolutely not at the level of legislation designed to turn the rest of us into cops.
A case in point.
If i write an ardent defense of socialism, some less privileged people might go out and break into the rich people's house down the road. Should I not be allowed to talk advocate socialism then?
If i advocate traditional christian values, some people may go out and attack open homosexuals and single mothers. Should Christians be censored too?
Why does immigration receive a special censorship on the grounds some people may be targeted and nothing else does?
I think I see your problem. You're confusing the mechanisms of censorship - the curtailing of freedom of expression - with the dynamic reactions of other people to socially unpopular opinions. If you find yourself self-censoring in your conversations - a slightly different thing to being censored, but whatever - to avoid such negative feedback, congratulations: you've just found yourself in a minority and have side-stepped having to justify your own existence.
And yet, a non-optional self-justification (for those of us who don't look or sound 'local') is something you apparently expect others here to undergo when they are drawn into talk about there being too many immigrants or how The Muslims are Taking Over. To illustrate - as English as I may sound in real life, I will always have a brown skin, and certain groups of people will always home in on my appearance as an indicator for 'foreign' and/or 'Muslim'. Are you seriously going to tell me not to take it personally when I hear 'go back where you came from' or worse? I mean, if we're really talking about popular discourse on immigration, this is precisely what an awful lot of it comes down to, and there's no detoxifying it because it's said with the exact opposite of dispassion. Why should I - or anyone else - pretend that this isn't the case?
Topic: Anti-immigration