Recently, Bradford employers indicated that mass immigration into the UK had, on the whole, proven to be a benefit to Bradford.

This was at variance with the House of Lords cross-party Economic Committee which issued a report stating that mass immigration had benefited only the immigrants. They had priced thousands of indigenous people out of a job and in some areas had pushed up the price of housing.

The presence of more than a million newcomers in the UK since the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004 - and most recently in January 2007 - remains an issue of urgent public concern.

Against this background Steve Waters has pitched his play Fast Labour, which premieres at West Yorkshire Playhouse on Saturday, April 19.

He said: "The boundaries between legitimate migrant and illegitimate have changed since I went to the Ukraine in 2005 to research the play. I was invited by a young Ukrainian who wrote a paper for the Transport & General Workers' Union about Ukrainians in the British economy.

"What we consider our benighted communities are nothing compared to theirs, with people living off barter, market gardens and the odd chicken.

"My character Victor used to run a sausage factory in the Ukraine. In the post-independence era after Communism he finds himself in a dangerous game and comes to this country.

"He's not a teenager. He's a man of some substance with a previous life and high expectations. He's involved in agriculture, food processing and employing people."

Having arrived in this country illegally and being saved from the risk of deportation, Victor sets about making his mark.

Under the eye of his gang-master, Grimmer, he watches and learns, teaches himself English, familiarises himself with the rules and regulations and then creates his own business.

Reaping the rewards of his capitalist venture, Victor becomes greedy and neglects the safety and well-being of his workers in order to meet demand; but the choices he makes have disastrous consequences.

That's the nub of Fast Labour's plot. The question I wanted to ask Steve, who is obviously a playwright concerned with social issues, is whether his play was entertainment or a piece of proselytising propaganda.

"I don't believe in proselytising actually. If a play is going to do that it has got to be something an audience wants to receive. No character stands for me.

"I think the play is quite funny in parts. There is a comic dimension and a satiric one. The play is not about trying to make an audience feel sorry for these characters.

"My feeling is that the most exciting moments can be when cultures meet each other. Sometimes it's a threat, other times it is very energising, so the play is entertaining first and proselytising a long way second," he added.

Since the second European enlargement last year, which admitted Romanians and Bulgarians, the nature of immigration has changed again. Gordon Brown and his ministers claim that it's all a great benefit, but is it?

"Migrant labour is a warning to all of us what it means to live in globalised times. There is official reality and reality. Beneath the shiny world of official reality is a squalid world that's necessary to make the shiny world exist," he added.

  • Fast Labour is on at West Yorkshire Playhouse from April 19 until May 17, starting at 7.45pm. The box office number is (0113) 2137700.