For me the concept of Freedom of Movement (FoM) in the EU is one of the greatest accomplishments ever. How can you not like it? What's wrong with being able to move from one country to another, almost like moving from one city to another in your own country? Nothing. It's liberating. There are so many experiences to be had. As far as I am concerned, it is actually still not easy enough.
I've only recently learned that until not too long ago people in Germany could not even leave their villages to look for work someplace else without some authority allowing them to do so first. OK, this rule was abolished quite a while ago but until the EU came into being, it was still somewhat difficult to move from one European country to another for work, and travelling outside of a select group of countries that had deals with each other often required visas. As soon as you want to move outside of the EU, things still get a lot trickier and often very expensive. And even more so for people without an EU passport.
With that in mind, the referendum on 23 June 2016 about whether the UK should leave the EU was something I was not happy about. As a non-British EU citizen I was not even allowed to take part in it, despite the effects it would potentially have on my family.
The referendum result was the opposite of everything I had learned to hold dear over the years. The following day when I heard about the outcome I was mainly in tears and had much to think about:
- First of all, I wondered why people would vote that way. There are many who would love to leave their hometowns or countries and can't because of the rules of the country they are living in. Or because of the rules of the country they would like to move to. The EU allows us to move (almost) freely between its member states. For me not wanting to have this freedom means to prefer to live in self-imposed shackles as movement of citizens could be controlled tightly again. Looking back, it seems many Brits simply did not understand at all what FoM means.
- Were there really that many people in the UK who wanted their country to be out of the EU? I got some solace from the fact that only a certain percentage of the population had voted and that the Brexit voting group was in real numbers roughly just a quarter of the whole population of the UK - much like the result of any election. Still, they had won. Albeit on a tight margin that other governments in other countries most likely would not have allowed for such an important question. The referendum was labelled as 'advisory' but the UK government has been completely disregarding this and is taking the result as 'the will of the people'.
- What exactly people had been voting for: what kind of Brexit did they envision when they made their choice to leave the EU? Nobody really knows as the question on the ballot paper was far too general. For two years after the referendum the government kept insisting that people wanted a withdrawal agreement (a 'deal') with the EU and set 'red lines' that often didn't have much to do with what was talked about in the actual campaign leading up to the referendum. The next PM claimed that people voted to leave without a 'deal'.
Many of the non-British EU citizens living in the UK have described what happened to them after the referendum as emotionally similar to discovering their partner had an affair and now suddenly wants to break up with them. They were still in the honeymoon phase of moving to another place, still so in love with it (and possibly had no big interest in politics) that they didn't see the writing on the wall at all. It's a feeling that I can completely understand but it wasn't exactly like that for me after ten long years in the UK, in my role as secretary in a community group I had been following the news over the past years quite intensely.
Even though I don't read the widely popular British right wing papers, I got to see enough of the signs of general dislike of immigrants, just by reading about the laws and rules Theresa May implemented in her role as Home Secretary; keyword 'hostile environment'. I remember telling a British acquaintance about this and the terrible detention centres which can lock up people forever. She didn't seem to believe me. If this kind of news hardly makes it to the Brits, I'm not surprised that others don't see it either. It's the kind of news most people will not seek out voluntarily, and that gets ignored in most countries by the natives as it usually doesn’t affect them.
At that point of my deliberations a feeling of dread started to settle on me.
I had two conversations directly after the referendum that really didn't help:
- On the day after the referendum, a neighbour knocked on the door. She acted as if nothing had happened and innocently asked me how I was. I answered truthfully that the referendum result didn't sit well with me. She was puzzled as to why I didn't like it and in the conversation said something along the lines of 'it's not right that all those people come here' (referring to Romanians). I said to her that I was an immigrant (of sorts) too, I was also a young person once who came to the UK without money and asked for income benefit. I made the best of it, found a job, earned money. I'm pretty sure most of those other people coming to the UK want to do exactly the same. And they don't only come to the UK, they also go to other countries. Just like British (young and old) people move around Europe. She looked a bit taken aback and said 'hm, I didn't think of people like you'. (Did she change her mind? I don't know, I tried to avoid her afterwards. In one other conversation that I couldn’t get out of she said that everybody was lied to before the referendum. Sorry, I can't agree with that.)
- The other one was with an older man who when passing my garden, made a comment about my beautiful flowers and then picked up on my accent. We had a sort of OK conversation until the point where he was going on about people who don't earn money - fully knowing by that time that I was a family member of an EU citizen (I was not in employment). In his opinion these people should be imprisoned. I felt very uncomfortable about this turn and asked him to leave as we clearly had nothing in common. He made me feel sick in my stomach.
About a year later I also got a Facebook comment that I should be speaking English with my son when going about my business in the UK. Apparently this person was also trying to speak the language of every country she visited... Yeah, right. I reminded her that English wasn't the only language spoken in the UK and that it was entirely my business in which language I speak to my child.
All of this was nothing compared to the xenophobic events I read (and still read) about, school children being taunted, some EU citizens being beaten up for no reason other than not being British enough. Yes, these are exceptions and I do have lovely British friends who are through and through European, and you find horrible people everywhere, but it just felt really overwhelmingly wrong to live with that (and inflict it on my son!) if I didn't have to.
I was also concerned about my democratic rights and became aware that my status in the UK wasn't as secure as I had thought.
As a German EU citizen I was not allowed to vote in the UK general elections (only German ones), but as an EU citizen in the UK I always had the right to take part in local elections and, of course, in European elections. That was fine with me. Then I discovered that as a German I could lose the right to vote in German general elections after 25 years of not living there (there are exceptions but I was not sure at all that they would have applied to me). So I was in the same situation as Brits who live abroad (they have an even shorter limit of 15 years): I was going to lose a very important democratic right and unless I took citizenship in the country I lived in (or move to Germany), I couldn't get it back.
Acquiring another national EU citizenship wasn't something I ever thought about as we were in the EU where we have citizen rights everywhere (apart from the general election voting rights), it simply didn’t seem necessary. The UK government had always assured us that there was nothing we needed to do to live there. And as you don't register yourself locally in the UK (like we do in Germany), that was that, everything seemed sorted.
If it hadn't been for Brexit, this voting situation still wouldn't have bothered me that much, even though I think that this is a big democratic gap in the EU project that needs fixing. Unfortunately, it has been left to the member states to decide who can vote in their general elections and they all have different rules.
Still, setting my worries about xenophobia aside, for a while I entertained the thought of taking on British citizenship in addition to my German one, becoming a dual citizen and protecting my democratic rights and status that way. I soon found that this was a quest with a lot of what-ifs (there was no 'settled status' then).
I realised that time was running out for me to obtain dual citizenship. I was thinking, all I need to do is to apply for permanent residency (PR) and then British citizenship (and pay something near to £2000 in the process, language test etc. included). However, due to my special circumstances as a non-working family member of a (working) EU citizen I most likely would not have been granted PR then, only after about five years’ time. The reason for that was that I hadn't registered myself as a family member because I simply didn't know I had to do that (believing what the government said that everything is fine). By the time I eventually would have accrued my five registered years that I needed to obtain PR, the UK most likely would have left the EU - which would have made the dual citizenship quest impossible as Germany only allows to have dual citizenship with another EU country. So by the time I would have got PR the UK most likely would have been out, and there would have been no dual citizenship for me (unless the German government changed the law). Now with the new 'settled status' set up especially for EU citizens in the UK my situation maybe could have worked out differently but I'm not so sure (as comprehensive private health insurance is still an issue when applying for British citizenship).
One thing was clear, I was not giving up my German (EU) citizenship, so an attempt to get PR in five years’ time was useless to me. However, staying in the UK I would become somebody who could NOT vote in a) any UK general election, b) possibly any EU election, c) most likely in local UK elections, and d) in German general elections any more. It looked like I would become completely voiceless. A frightening outlook.
My working husband (who could have had dual citizenship easily) was faster than me in making up his mind, he just wanted to go, almost straight away.
At some point, I realised that I could not react openly anymore to people who I did not know. There was always the question in my head whether they voted for Brexit and if so, how they would react to me being a foreigner. The referendum result was slowly poisoning my social interactions and my life.
Despite living in a very non-Brexit area of the UK, in the end I decided that while *I* could maybe stick it out as a second class citizen, I simply cannot have my son grow up somewhere becoming so openly xenophobic at an alarming rate. I would never forgive myself if something happened to him because he was not British born (despite actually having been born in the UK). However, I was able to make sure that he got registered as a British citizen (at the stately fee of around £1000), so that he has the freedom to live in the UK should he ever want to.
After 12 years in the UK the thought of moving country yet again was half dreadful, half exciting. I always thought we would stay forever and absolutely hated that I would have to leave behind my network of very valued friends. But I was happy about moving house (it was too small), getting closer to my relatives (especially my rapidly ageing mother), and being able to get my son into the German education system where he would finally learn proper German. I was very worried about my son not liking a move away from his hometown but he took the whole thing on the chin and never complained.
As a family it took us about 18 months to finalise our decision. We were going to leave for Germany.
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| Summer 2018 |
