A DORSET MP is calling on the Home Office to let a teenage asylum seeker at least finish his education at Bournemouth University before they boot him out.

Annette Brooke, MP for mid-Dorset and north Poole, is due to meet 19-year-old Andrei Bazanov and his foster family on Saturday, but has already said that he should be allowed to finish his degree in software engineering management. He has already been offered a full-time job after graduation, if he's allowed to stay.

His former teachers at Bournemouth School and current students are so incensed by his plight hundreds have signed a petition and written to Tony Blair.

Immigration officials want to send Andrei back to Moldova, the tiny former Soviet republic, where he is from.

He arrived hidden in the back of a lorry at Poole aged 15 but since then has fully integrated into the British way of life, excelling at GCSEs and A-levels, working part-time and making lots of friends.

"He's not a waster sitting in a hotel living off benefits," said foster dad Bob Roper. "He was offered Housing Benefit in lieu of his wages at Comet and even though he would have been better off, Andrei decided he would rather work and give something back to the country that has given him a new start.

"That's the measure of the young man. What the Home Office is doing is cruel. They give him a taster of what he could become and then send him back to poverty and degradation.

"What they are doing is also ripping our family apart because we look on Andrei like a son."

Mrs Brooke said: "At the very least he should be allowed to finish his degree. This country has invested in this young man.

"I visited Moldova last year and met someone with a degree in computing who couldn't find work. One of the problems there is a high level of unemployment."

First published: October 15