When the news appeared in my security feed that international students were being  if caught overstaying on their visa and claiming asylum, I wondered if the physical removal part of the procedure would come down to security staff like me.

It wouldn’t be the roughest ejection I’ve been involved with as a guard: I once had to help get a gentleman off the university grounds who’d passed out in undergrowth after injecting heroin into his penis. But it would probably be the ugliest. 

I read the  that had been sent to 10,000 international students: “If you submit an asylum claim that lacks merit, it will be swiftly and robustly refused…If you have no legal right to remain in the UK, you must leave. If you don’t, we will remove you.”

I’m guessing whoever sent the message meant the “royal we” – office staff don’t tend to lead from the front whenever an intruder needs to be chucked off the premises. When a rough sleeper took to having his morning number twos on the doorstep of the personnel block in the city centre, an office of 20-plus people would phone the one available guard to drive over and move him on – as well as to move on the token of appreciation he’d left on the welcome mat.

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It’s possibly a coincidence that the plan to chase off international students suspected of overstaying has come at the same time as a spate of  around the UK. Having recently completed my first aid refresher training, all the crosses of St George I see around the city feel more like a guerrilla advertising campaign for the British Red Cross than an anti-immigration protest, but on campus we’re vigilant about any emblems hoisted without permission by both domestic students and internationals. We’ve also been on standby to call the police should anyone stick up a Palestine Action poster since the group was controversially  a terrorist organisation by the government.

We do sometimes have to carry out evictions from student accommodation, but it takes a long time for the process to reach that point. The current unacceptable and unsafe acts policy that undergraduates sign up to at my university has a 12-stage checklist; hurdles to cross before ejection include behavioural breaches, noise abatement orders, confiscation of dangerous substances and, finally, being served a notice-to-quit. This then potentially escalates things to a legal level and the case can join the  at magistrates’ courts.

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Away from the paperwork, the most galling issue my shift-mates and I deal with isn’t overcrowding or overstaying. It’s what happens when the campus is quiet and the real freeloaders sneak on to campus: the ones who aren’t interested in learning about a foreign culture or forging an international relationship. Nearly every night this summer, for instance, we’ve been chasing off a gang who are trying to hook the koi out of the university fishpond. Apart from one lucky seagull, no one’s got past us yet, though – and that’s probably just as well as I still haven’t done my fish first aid course.

Stealing ornamental fish doesn’t seem like much of a career. On my phone, there are  saying foreign students come to the UK looking for off-the-books work – but then, when they graduate, they somehow grab the top jobs that should be going to Brits. But the idea that all that leaves for the Brit is koi theft doesn’t sound like it would bear much scrutiny in an economics class.

I’d always assumed it was better for a talented international graduate to do a job over here – and pay tax on their wages – than it was for them to leave the country as soon as they’d got their scroll and start earning big bucks overseas. If the flag-drapers want the best talent for their local football team regardless of their nationality, why wouldn’t they feel the same about their local hospital or business park? Especially given that 28 per cent of British 18- to 30-year-olds are  considering emigrating anyway, according to the Adam Smith institute.

There are other notifications in my feed about the university , and if I look past the lurid headlines, I see that the number of international students in the UK is actually falling: a 17 per cent drop was  in May. There may be a further drop if there are more incidents of nurses being  in public and accused of having “come off a rubber boat”, or Chinese takeaways being  with anti-immigrant graffiti. Not a great prospect if you’re employed by your local university.

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It is also worth saying that when it comes to overstaying their rental contracts, British students, in my experience, are just as likely to abuse the system as international students. And getting them out is just as hard.

In the last eviction case we dealt with, a British kid had stopped paying rent and refused to answer the accommodation department’s emails, preferring to come to the security counter and breathe all over our receptionist. He’d passed his 12 checkpoints on the tenancy policy but wouldn’t answer his door to accept his notice-to-quit.

He finally left after turning his bathroom blue. He’d hauled body panels from his car indoors and sprayed them metallic navy in the shower. Maybe if he’d added red and white, he could have painted himself as a patriotic martyr. But that wouldn’t have cut much ice with the cleaner on just above the minimum wage who had to deal with the mess.

George Bass is a security guard at a UK university.

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