Tom Page/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by)
When I was asked to write a piece about Poles and other EU citizens living in the UK and their perspectives on Brexit, my first thought was that Polish people in the UK are little different from the millions of UK citizens living or travelling to work in other EU countries, or from French, German and other western Europeans living in Britain. All have equal reason to feel horrified by the prospect of Brexit.
It has been almost twelve years since Poland and other central and east European countries joined the EU: plenty of time for freedom of movement to seem normal and taken for granted, and for individual lives to be planned on the assumption that free movement was a right which would not be retracted. In some cases, exercising the right to free movement involves commuting across international borders. In many others, EU citizens have settled and put down roots in other EU countries, roots which might not be easy to tear up. This applies equally to Poles in the UK. As a Polish mother commented to me in Bristol, “definitely we’ll be in the UK for a long, long time, because, well, it’s obvious that children can’t be continually chopping and changing”.
