Waiting for Brexit

“For people like me who have been here for 18 years it is heartbreaking.” It is a warm, sunny Friday morning in west London, but a dark cloud hangs over Axel Antoni, a German retail consultant. A hard Brexit is looming and as Britain prepares to end a 40-year marriage to the continent, Europeans on this side of the channel worry.

Antoni is one of the thousands of migrants who on Monday 20th February missed on a day’s work to attend a mass lobby outside parliament. One of the goals was to put pressure on the government to guarantee the rights of the 2.9m European Union nationals living here. Antoni moved to London in 1997 and now has a British wife and two British-born children. And yet a scenario in which he is told to leave this country is not as implausible as it might sound.

So far nothing has changed. EU nationals like him have the right to live and work in Britain until it officially leaves the EU, which will not be for at least another two years. But what then? “It’s the not knowing,” Antoni tells me. “Having paid into the system, being fully integrated, doing voluntary work at a school, and now we are just being made into the bargaining chip. We are being used by the politicians at the moment.”

According to a report by the New Economics Foundation, the UK economy would lose £328m if all migrants stopped working for the day, the equivalent of 4 per cent of daily UK GDP. Migrant workers make up 10.9 per cent of the workforce, and in some sectors far more—26 per cent of health professionals, for instance.

Applications for permanent residency and British citizenship have dramatically increased in the last few months. From people who have been here for decades and have British children, to young professionals with thriving careers, all will have to go through a painstaking process. The application for permanent residency alone is 85 pages long. “I have a stack of papers and documents at home that weighs almost eight kilograms,” Antoni says.

The phrase “I have nothing to go back to” is often heard from people fleeing war in Syria or ethnic violence in Nigeria. But everyone I spoke to about this issue—some of them from the richest countries in Europe—kept expressing the same sense of finality. “My life is here, there’s no plan B.”

The battle for British residency and nationality is set to be harder for women. Under a little-known rule, EU citizens not in work must buy private health insurance. Some stay-at-home mothers, unaware of the law, never purchased it, thinking their rights were the same as any British national. Single mother Sabine von Toerne, a midwife from Berlin who has lived in the UK since 2010, was caught by surprise last March when applying for British citizenship. “I was told that my time here as a student midwife didn’t count because I wasn’t paying comprehensive sickness insurance.”

As women are the ones more likely to give up their careers to look after their children, thousands of EU women who have been residing in this country for years are set to have their applications for permanent residency denied. “I feel like a second-class citizen. I have now purchased private insurance, which costs me £75 a month,” Sabine tells me. As she makes up for the time she didn’t have the required insurance, it will be a few more years until she is eligible to apply for a British passport.

For some, the fight is not just about not being kicked out, but about staying under the right conditions. Diego Farias moved to the UK from Hungary three years ago with his wife, who was offered a managerial position at a multinational company. Farias alluded to an environment in which EU migrants are given privileges instead of rights. “This is the British way: they don’t say it, they just do it,” he tells me bluntly. “No one is asking us to leave, but they will do it by slowly neglecting to hire European people. They are going to give me the right of residency but you have to pay for your GP.”

Hearing people’s stories, I can’t help but compare their experiences with my own as a Portuguese national living in London. This has been home for the last 12 years of my life. My partner is British, I have a thriving career here. And yet I feel no desire to fight to stay in a country that doesn’t want me in the first place. The application for a residency card remains on my desk, gathering dust.

As migrants from Europe and beyond are discussed by the governments in terms of statistics, skills and the “valuable contribution” they make to the economy, decision-makers lose sight of the real and most important cost of leaving people in a state of limbo: the human cost.

I was going to interview a German woman in Oxford for this article. The day before she contacted me to cancel, saying she was suffering from severe panic and depressive attacks. Like many others, her life is in Britain, her friends and work are here. She told me over the phone how the news headlines gave her no reason to hope for the best. “If they can shut the door to refugee children, imagine what they can do to us.”