LONDON — The British government won’t extend the June 30 deadline for European Union citizens within the U.K. to apply for permanent residency or risk losing their right to live and work within the U.K.
Britain’s departure from the EU last yr ended the automatic right of individuals from the bloc to settle within the U.K., and of Britons to live within the 27 EU nations. As part of the divorce, both sides agreed everyone would maintain the residence rights they had before Brexit.
In Britain, that means citizens of the EU and several other European nations must apply online for confirmation of their “settled status” if they need to continue to work, study or receive social benefits.
The U.K. government says there have been 5.6 million applications since the program opened in March 2019, only a handful of which have been refused. That’s far more than the government’s pre-Brexit estimate that about 3 million EU citizens lived in Britain. The number of EU residents in Britain who haven’t applied is unknown.
“I want to be clear — we will not be extending the deadline,” Immigration Minister Kevin Foster mentioned Wednesday. “Put simply, extending the deadline is not a solution in itself to reaching those individuals who have not but applied and we would just be in a position further down the line where we would be asked to extend again, creating even more uncertainty.”
The government says individuals who have applied by the end of June will be sent letters giving them 28 days to act. Individuals will also be able to apply after the deadline if that they had “reasonable grounds,” such as an illness that prevented them from doing it sooner, Foster mentioned.
EU citizens’ advocates worry that some people are still unaware they need to apply, whereas others are caught in a backlog of 400,000 applications that have yet to be processed.
They also want the British government to provide bodily, rather than just digital, proof of residents’ status. Many fear a repeat of the traumatic experience of thousands of Caribbean immigrants who settled within the U.K. after World War II only to be denied jobs and medical care and even threatened with deportation decades later because they did not have paperwork to prove their right to live in Britain.
Alberto Costa, a lawmaker from Britain’s governing Conservative Party who has campaigned on behalf of EU citizens, mentioned Prime Minister Boris Johnson had assured him that no eligible resident “will be denied their rights.”
“I’ll do everything in my power to ensure the government honors its promises to those citizens,” he mentioned.
Other EU nations have made similar arrangements for the estimated 1 million U.K. citizens who reside there. In some, the right to remain is being granted automatically whereas in others British citizens have to apply.
Free movement for individuals amongst EU member states is a core principle of the bloc, and Britain’s 2016 vote to leave was, in part, a reaction to high levels of immigration. More than 1 million EU citizens moved to the U.K after eight formerly communist eastern European nations joined the bloc in 2004.
