The following report was published today on the BBC web site. Upon reading it the impression is that a "crime wave" perpetrated by Eastern European immigrants to the UK turned out to be fiction and was fanned by press quotes of senior police officers such as Cambridgeshire's Chief Constable, Julie Spence.

A survey carried out nationwide by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) confirmed that Eastern European immigrants were not responsible for more crimes than any other racial groups. This came after the seeds of such an assumed accusation had been planted by people in authority such as the aforementioned Julie Spence.

Why do such things occur in a so-called civilized society such as the UK? First of all let's go back to the 1950's after the Second World War. Millions of immigrants from Britain's Caribbean colonies arrived in the UK to work as bus drivers, garbage collectors and nurses since there was not enough white Caucasian labor to fill these vital positions and keep society running.

These immigrants aroused similar suspicions more than 50 years ago and when the economy hit a bad spot in the early 1960's, the immigrants were accused of "stealing jobs", crime mongering and so on. This is typical of a profoundly national racist mindset as we are seeing in the US today, especially from the Republican Party. In the case of the UK in the 1950's however, these immigrants were British subjects � but not Caucasian.

To sow such opinions and rumors is easy if you have the corporate press on your side picking up any baseless prejudicial comment about "immigrants" and shaping public opinion subliminally so as to cause a backlash against hard working, decent people. The problem is that these hard working, decent people may have a different skin color, ethnic and cultural background and do not speak the "world language" which is English. This is why the report concludes that there has been "an increase in tensions".

One of the authors of the Acpo report, Peter Fahy, appears not to believe the findings of the report he co-authored himself when he says, "So it wouldn't really make sense that given we've brought in something like 800,000 to 1,000,000 from Eastern Europe, during that period crime has actually fallen significantly." Even Fahy implies that crime should have risen on the basis this remark and it is as if he cannot believe that Eastern European worker immigrants are not "potential criminals".

The use of quotation marks in 'unfounded' in the title of the BBC piece is unwarranted. The use of quotation marks when addressing such a sensitive subject somehow obviates the validity of the survey carried out by Acpo � implying that European immigrants could somehow be responsible for a "crime wave", even though in the article itself it is clearly stated that crime fell 9% in the period under review � July � September 2007.

The BBC report does not beg other more important questions. For example, are these immigrant workers being paid the minimum wage for their labor? Or are they being exploited by unscrupulous capitalist employers paying starvation wages?

The BBC, as a supposedly responsible new service, should take on more social responsibility and publish hard facts about the treatment of this sudden influx of Eastern Europeans.

However, based on the evidence of this article, instead of defending human and civil rights, the BBC prefers to publish speculative almost sensationalist reports about a non-existent crime wave. This approach is tantamount to pandering to the nascent racism in British society and simultaneously fanning the subliminal flames of racial prejudice using its huge media reach not only in the UK, but also internationally.

The article itself reveals more about racist attitudes in the UK today and in its media than even the race riots which took place in London in the early 1980's.

Read the article below and draw your own conclusions.

- Arturo Rosales

Migrant crime fears 'unfounded'