Great Britain has threatened EU citizens who no longer have a residence permit after Brexit with the expulsion. Anyone who stays in the UK is illegal, said Kevin Foster, Secretary of State for Immigration, to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “We expect people to leave the country voluntarily, but if they don’t, the immigration service will try to enforce their departure,” said the conservative politician.
One of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s key Brexit promises was to end freedom of movement. EU citizens who lived in the country before Britain left the EU customs union and internal market on January 1, 2021, could apply for a new residence status until the end of June 2021, which would give them access to the health system, the labor market and social benefits even after Brexit should secure. More than six million people did so, and so far 5.4 million applications have been approved.
Loosening of the visa rules rejected
As of the end of August, 400,000 applications were still being processed. “The public rightly expects us to remove those who have no right to be in the UK,” Foster said.
He refused to relax the visa rules in order to allow urgently needed specialists back into the country. The new immigration system is not the cause of the many vacancies, claimed the politician. The fact that EU countries are also desperately looking for employees in logistics or catering shows that Brexit is not the cause of the problem. Business associations, on the other hand, have long been calling for exemptions to remedy the pressing shortage of skilled workers.