Britain’s EU workers gripped by fear, confusion, heartache

Anna Woydyla, a 42-year-old Pole who has lived in Britain for 11 years, who works at a restaurant, is deeply anxious about her future. Many of the hundreds of thousands of workers in Britain who hail from other EU countries are struggling with uncertainty about their future in Britain after the nation voted to leave the 28-member bloc. Pawel Kuczynski/AP PhotoShow less

LONDON // A tsunami of uncertainty has engulfed Anna Woydyla, a Polish restaurant worker in London, since Britain voted to leave the European Union.

Would her two teenage children, who grew up in the United Kingdom, still qualify for loans to study at British universities? Would she and her husband, after 11 years of working here, have to sell the home they just bought? Leave their jobs, or their new country? Try to apply for citizenship?

The 41-year-old is among hundreds of thousands of European Union workers in Britain who are fearful and confused over what happens next as their adoptive country begins the long process of unwinding its many ties to continental Europe.

“If it were just me, I could even return to Poland,” a visibly tense Woydyla said as she stocked a bar in an Italian restaurant in London’s Camden district. “But my kids are more English than Polish. They don’t even want to go to Poland for their holidays anymore. They even speak to each other in English.”

An entire class of cosmopolitan entrepreneurs, workers, students and strivers who have made the UK their home since Britain opened its borders to its EU neighbours now see their futures in limbo.

The immigrants changed the face of Britain, turning London’s Kensington neighbourhood into a suburb of Paris, and changing sleepy English towns like Boston into Baltic enclaves.

“I personally cannot tell what’s going to change for me,” said Andrea Cordaro, 21, an Italian student who compared the shock of hearing the referendum’s result to the punch-in-the-gut feeling of flunking an exam. “I’ll just have to keep my head up and hope for the best.”

Laurence Borel, a 36-year-old digital marketing consultant from France, is not waiting to find out what’s coming next. She asked for her British passport in May after more than 15 years living in the country.

“I’ll bet a lot of people are applying,” she said, explaining that she’d been mulling the idea of a passport for years but the referendum prompted her to act.

“I don’t want to go back to France,” she said. “My life is here.”

Over the long term though, the lives of the estimated 3 million EU citizens living in Britain may change in ways big and small. A survey commissioned by the Financial Times found that if Britain's current immigration rules were applied to EU nationals, the overwhelming majority would lose their jobs and be forced to leave the country – catastrophic news for Spanish barristas, Romanian strawberry pickers, German investment bankers and the industries that rely on them.

The biggest impact may be on the Poles, the largest group of foreign EU workers in the UK.

An estimated 850,000 people from Poland are now in the UK, seeking wages and opportunities far beyond what they could ever expect in their ex-communist homeland, a flow so dramatic that Polish is now England’s second-most-spoken language.

The fate of the Poles in Britain is such an important domestic issue in Poland that president Andrzej Duda vowed after the British referendum that Polish leaders will “do everything to keep the rights unchanged” in upcoming negotiations with British leaders.

Under British law, EU immigrants who have resided in the UK for more than five years can apply for permanent residency. In practice, however, few EU citizens have bothered as their passports already allow them to travel freely and easily access education, health care, pensions and other services in Britain.

The Polish Institute of International Affairs, a Warsaw-based think tank, has estimated that still leaves up to 400,000 Poles who arrived in Britain after 2012. Though the path forward is still unclear, it is possible that they – along with hundreds of thousands more from elsewhere in Europe – may have to apply for work visas and, if rejected, have to leave the country.

Iosif Achim, a 32-year-old from Satu Mare, Romania, has been in Britain for six years but never bothered to apply for a residency permit.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” said Achim. “But in my opinion this is going to be bad.”

The concern was mirrored across the Channel by the estimated 1.2 million UK citizens living in Europe.

The referendum “shouldn’t affect me too much but it could,” said Herman Martin, a British composer who has lived in Brussels for the past 24 years. Overall, he said, the British vote to leave the EU would be a disaster for both parties.

“I find it quite disturbing,” he said.

* Associated Press