You definitely need to look at these things per capita. The UK prison population is 159 per 100,000 people. So 835 Polish people in prison out of 700,000 people is basically 120 per 100,000. So Polish people are a fair bit less likely to commit crime than UK citizens, which makes sense. The sort of people who move to another country to work tend to have their shit together enough to not want/need to resort to crime.
Estimates put Albanians at around 70,000 in England and Wales, which would put their incarceration rate at something like 1560 per 100,000 people. Presumably slightly less if we add in Scotland and N.Ireland's figures, but basically ten times the UK average. Assuming those figures are accurate, that is a genuine issue that needs looking at. There have definitely been cases in the past of Albanians coming over to the UK and claiming asylum as Kosovans fleeing the war, and I was surprised to learn that there were large numbers of Albanians still attempting to claim asylum in the UK. Sorry, but Albania isn't at war. There's no excuse. But there might be a criminal network facilitating this sort of thing.
It reminds me of a story from Vietnam. A while ago, a lot of countries started denying visas to Vietnamese people from a couple of provinces. Basically, these people had a reputation for overstaying their visas and basically disappearing. They weren't particularly rich provinces, but there was obviously a criminal network involved, advising people how to disappear and setting them up with jobs. In response, Vietnam decided they were going to remove the bit of the passport that said your birthplace. Overnight, they managed to invalidate the passport of every new applicant, as every other country refused to recognise them as valid, basically apparently the birthplace is part of the international standards for passports. They had to backtrack almost immediately.
But yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if a similar thing happens with Albania.
