Brexit Has Triggered Britain's Most Ambitious Migration Exercise Ever
Rebecca Goodall first moved to Britain when she was 10, and lived in the country on and off before settling here permanently in 2010. She teaches real estate at a university about two hours north of London, has a child who was born and raised here, and speaks unaccented English—she has, she told me in frustration, a “bloody master’s degree.”
But until recently, Goodall didn’t know if she could still live here.
As a German citizen, Goodall is among the millions of European Union nationals living in the U.K. whose immigration status was thrown into doubt after the 2016 Brexit referendum. Under the bloc’s rules, EU nationals can freely live, work, and settle anywhere across its 28 member states. Putting an end to this free flow of migration from Europe was one of the central planks of the Brexit debate and, now that Britain is leaving, all EU nationals who wish to remain in the country indefinitely need to apply for a new post-Brexit migration designation, otherwise known as “settled status.”
It won’t be easy, though. An estimated 3.5 million EU nationals are expected to apply for settled status over the nextof a litany of bureaucratic challenges that London must address because of Brexit, from the seemingly minor (keeping food-supply chains going undisrupted) to the indisputably major (maintaining peace on the island of Ireland).
