Fate of EU citizens in the UK post Brexit

[TopCat]

This already happened in the early noughties when fines to employers for employing staff without a "right to work" were introduced.

Was the person concerned employed by the same org since the early nineties? No change of employer since?

 

[tim]

Landlord Zone ... Words to strike fear into anyone's heart.

Not into an assassin's heart.

 

[TopCat]

There are more than a few details missing and a few questions that are begged

So a Spanish citizen with a Spanish birth certificate who moved here as a baby.

Never applied for a driving licence? Nor a passport? What ID they existed on is questionable.

Let alone 44 years resident here and only prompted by the uk leaving the EU do they enquire about residency.

It’s curious

 

[Orang Utan]

There are more than a few details missing and a few questions that are begged

So a Spanish citizen with a Spanish birth certificate who moved here as a baby.

Never applied for a driving licence? Nor a passport? What ID they existed on is questionable.

Let alone 44 years resident here and only prompted by the uk leaving the EU do they enquire about residency.

It’s curious

why do you think so? it’s perfectly normal to never apply for those things. and if you’ve grown up here since you were a baby, you could easily think yourself as British and not have it in mind that you weren’t considered to be by the Home Office

 

[Pickman's model]

There are more than a few details missing and a few questions that are begged

So a Spanish citizen with a Spanish birth certificate who moved here as a baby.

Never applied for a driving licence? Nor a passport? What ID they existed on is questionable.

Let alone 44 years resident here and only prompted by the uk leaving the EU do they enquire about residency.

It’s curious

about 3.5m people have neither a driving licence or passport, so she's hardly alone

 

[andysays]

about 3.5m people have neither a driving licence or passport, so she's hardly alone

Yeah, I can believe the passport and driver's licence, but I wonder if this woman had, eg, an NI number or an NHS number.

 

[Pickman's model]

Yeah, I can believe the passport and driver's licence, but I wonder if this woman had, eg, an NI number or an NHS number.

sure she has both

 

[tim]

Yeah, I can believe the passport and driver's licence, but I wonder if this woman had, eg, an NI number or an NHS number.

You don't need to be a British national to get either, and for her entire adult life she would have had full residency and the right to work because she was an EU national.

 

[Flavour]

it is weird but these are exactly the sort of weird examples of people slipping through the gaps we knew would arise

 

[andysays]

You don't need to be a British national to get either.

I know that (you don't need to be one to get a driving licence either), but having one would certainly help to establishing long term residency.

 

[Orang Utan]

Yeah, I can believe the passport and driver's licence, but I wonder if this woman had, eg, an NI number or an NHS number.

She says in the article that she's been paying National Insurance and taxes

 

[Orang Utan]

I know that (you don't need to be one to get a driving licence either), but having one would certainly help to establishing long term residency.

not good enough for the home office

 

[andysays]

not good enough for the home office

Sorry, I'm not suggesting it is good enough for the Home Office, rather that if she has lived here all that time and paid tax and NI it should be possible to demonstrate her right to continue to live and work here, eventually.

Not that that solves her immediate problem.

 

[Orang Utan]

Sorry, I'm not suggesting it is good enough for the Home Office, rather that if she has lived here all that time and paid tax and NI it should be possible to demonstrate her right to continue to live and work here, eventually.

Not that that solves her immediate problem.

well yes, but if you read the article, many employers don’t read the extensive guidelines in full and there will be instances like this that where the employer will err on the side of caution when face with a larger fine

 

[andysays]

well yes, but if you read the article, many employers don’t read the extensive guidelines in full and there will be instances like this that where the employer will err on the side of caution when face with a larger fine

I'm not trying to deny that.

 

[ska invita]

Sorry, I'm not suggesting it is good enough for the Home Office, rather that if she has lived here all that time and paid tax and NI it should be possible to demonstrate her right to continue to live and work here, eventually.

Just like all those "windrush" now dead or expelled

 

[ska invita]

This is a good book, I recommend it, anthology of essays on different aspects of policing in the UK

Abolishing the Police - Dog Section Press

Abolishing the Police (An Illustrated Introduction) is both a contribution to this conversation and an invitation to join it. It provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing...

dogsection.org

Theres a chapter on borders which made something clearer to me... The UK border is no longer at Dover, it is at every possible interaction in society... Health service, work, accommodation etc. Being in the country barely helps, there will be interactions with border control as often as the state can make it happen

 

[ska invita]

This is a good book, I recommend it, anthology of essays on different aspects of policing in the UK

Abolishing the Police - Dog Section Press

Abolishing the Police (An Illustrated Introduction) is both a contribution to this conversation and an invitation to join it. It provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing...

dogsection.org

Theres a chapter on borders which made something clearer to me... The UK border is no longer at Dover, it is at every possible interaction in society... Health service, work, accommodation etc. Being in the country barely helps, there will be interactions with border control as often as the state can make it happen

theres a link there that lets you read it electronically = page 39 onwards

Abolishing the Police

“This is the first time we are seeing… a conversation about defunding, and some people having a conversation about abolishing the police and prison state. This must be what it felt like when people were talking about abolishing slavery.” – Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter. Abolishing the...

issuu.com

 

[editor]

Inspired by discussion on this thread, I spoke today with one of my (Polish) colleagues about their experience around Brexit and getting settled status.

He told me he'd applied ages ago, that he found the process quite simple to get through, and that he got a positive result for him and his (also Polish) wife quite quickly. He also said that he hadn't heard of anyone he knew, either through work or elsewhere who had significant difficulties sorting it out.

He also volunteered the info that he and his wife are currently applying for British passports, which they can have without giving up their Polish passports/citizenship. As I understand it, there's nothing more complicated to this than a normal passport application for a UK national.

Another of our colleagues is from Lithuania, which doesn't allow its citizens to have dual passports, so he (again as I understand it, this is secondhand info) has chosen to retain Lithuanian nationality for himself and his family, which is fair enough.

There are a few other colleagues I'm aware of who may be in similar situations (one Italian, one Slovak) so I'll ask them about their experiences if I get a chance.

Here's what she says:

The 45-year-old woman, who arrived in Britain as an 11-month-old baby and who has never left the country, said she has tried more than 100 times to get through to the Home Office-run helpline in the past three weeks, but has never been able to speak to an adviser.

Given the length of time I've spent trying to contact government/council agencies in the past, I would suspect that she's not alone.

 

[andysays]

Here's what she says:

Why are you quoting my post from 28 June?

 

[editor]

Why are you quoting my post from 28 June?

Because I just read it and wanted to respond to it. I didn't realise there was a time limit on your posts.

 

[andysays]

Because I just read it and wanted to respond to it. I didn't realise there was a time limit on your posts.

But what does it have to do with the story you've quoted in the same post?

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

You don't need to be a British national to get either, and for her entire adult life she would have had full residency and the right to work because she was an EU national.

EU nationals have not had the right to settle here for 40 years.


This is an unfortunate one. She says she has called 100 times in three weeks and not got through, what about the preceding five years, did she try to call then?

 

[Orang Utan]

EU nationals have not had the right to settle here for 40 years.


This is an unfortunate one. She says she has called 100 times in three weeks and not got through, what about the preceding five years, did she try to call then?

why would she?

 

[editor]

But what does it have to do with the story you've quoted in the same post?

You were saying how things had gone oh so smoothly for your Polish pal. I was pointing out that clearly not everyone is as fortunate and Brexit is causing real hardship and distress.

 

[andysays]

EU nationals have not had the right to settle here for 40 years.


This is an unfortunate one. She says she has called 100 times in three weeks and not got through, what about the preceding five years, did she try to call then?

It's quite possible that, as she's lived here since she was an infant, she didn't realise she needed to contact anyone.

She may have assumed, incorrectly but quite understandably, that she was already entitled to live and work in the UK and that Brexit didn't effect that.

 

[editor]

EU nationals have not had the right to settle here for 40 years.


This is an unfortunate one. She says she has called 100 times in three weeks and not got through, what about the preceding five years, did she try to call then?

Oh right, so it's her fault for not calling earlier!

She's pretty much lived her entire life in the UK. Paid taxes and contributed and is, I imagine, as 'British' as you can get.

So why would she start randomly calling up the Home Office?

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

why would she?

Because if she didn't she may lose her right to residency. The whole Brexit thing was quite well publicised, there were leaflets and all sorts of stuff.

 

[andysays]

You were saying how things had gone oh so smoothly for your Polish pal. I was pointing out that clearly not everyone is as fortunate and Brexit is causing real hardship and distress.

I don't think anyone is actually denying that Brexit is causing hardship and distress for some people; I'm certainly not.

But I still don't understand why you're quoting my post which describes how a couple of my colleagues who came to the UK from Poland and Lithuania to work as adults and therefore knew they needed to apply for settled status apparently managed to get it quite easily as if it's somehow relevant to the case of this Spanish woman who came to the UK as an infant and apparently didn't realise she needed to do anything until it was too late.

 

[Orang Utan]

Because if she didn't she may lose her right to residency. The whole Brexit thing was quite well publicised, there were leaflets and all sorts of stuff.

you’d be surprised how many people wouldn’t have read anything or just partially understood but assumed it didn’t apply to them