Participants in a pro-EU, anti-Brexit march pass through Piccadilly in London on July 23, 2016.Wikicommons/Katy Blackwood. Some rights reserved.Is the future of EU nationals in the UK really in jeopardy? As little as a year ago the threat of mass deportations seemed unthinkable. In the run-up to the referendum, Leave’s official lobby group promised that EU citizens would be allowed to stay. The post-Brexit confusion, however, has muddied those waters. Theresa May has said that she “expects” EU nationals will be allowed to remain – hardly reassuring for anyone worried about their future in the UK. The status of EU citizens in the UK is bound up with the existential problem that is Brexit: whether Britain is willing to ignore decades of moral and legal norms in order to separate itself from the EU.
There are currently 3.2 million EU nations living in the UK. As of 2015, only 16% hold British citizenship[i] though applications have been rising in the wake of the referendum. Of that group, not all will have been here for the five years required for permanent residency. On 6 July this year, the House of Commons passed a motion protecting the rights of EU nationals in the UK. The motion, however, is not binding. The government has so-far refused to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living here, preferring to use them as bargaining chips in Brexit negotiations. The government has so-far refused to guarantee the rights of EU citizens living here, preferring to use them as bargaining chips in Brexit negotiations.
It’s worthwhile setting aside the rhetoric surrounding the referendum to ask what that means. If the worst happens, what’s at stake is the widescale deportations of legal residents. Mass deportations are a spectacle more closely associated with warzones than a wealthy democracy. At this moment in time, of course, the suggestion seems absurd. It’s one of the reasons why the government has been able to defend its position – our good faith assumption that power will keep itself within acceptable boundaries. But 2016 has hammered home the message that liberal democracies are not as liberal as they once appeared. The year of Brexit and President Trump is not the time to use deportations as a bluff.
