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For me and millions others, Brexit will turn home turf into a foreign land

Welcome mat and wellington boots
‘Brexit is unique: what used to be home for European citizens has ceased to be.’ Photograph: Image Source/Getty Images/Image Source

You can try and surprise European citizens currently living in the UK, but there is very little chance you will succeed. There are about 3.7 million of us. We are from all over the EU, of various ages, professions and history, and our only shared characteristic is that we have settled in Britain at some point, because we wanted to and could, and then we suddenly became one unit of people – “EU citizens” – in the British public eye, on 24 June 2016. We have lived the past two and a half years in limbo.

We heard one home secretary after another promising that we would be fine after Brexit, while the negotiations in Brussels effectively turned us into bargaining chips. The Vote Leave campaign claimed that nothing would change for EU citizens, but every day that has passed since the vote has brought further proof that actually, almost everything will.

We are faced with the very real prospect of a no-deal Brexit, with both main opposition parties considering voting down whatever deal Theresa May manages to strike. This would compromise any “settled status” option for Europeans. Meanwhile, Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that “once we have left the EU, there will be no legal basis to treat [EU citizens] differently from migrants from non-EU countries”. This week’s migration advisory committee report has made it clear there will be no preferential treatment for EU citizens.

Now more than ever, EU citizens are making contingency plans, because it is the only thing we can do with certainty. Rees-Mogg surprised no one with his comments: he only spoke plainly what we have known all along.

Since 24 June 2016, we Europeans have become true migrants in Britain. When the UK leaves the EU, we will be indeed be treated as migrants like any other – regardless of our years-long relationship with this country. The catch is not in the word “migrant”, even if it grates – because in many countries these days “migrant” implies “unwanted”. The catch is in the talk of how we will be treated: long passport control lines at airports; expensive applications for visas and residency cards; Home Office horror stories of lost passports, wrongly deported citizens and “hostile environment” policies; and, obviously, that sticky “migrant” identifier. As someone from outside the EU told me shortly after the vote: “It was always like that for us.”

On 29 March 2019, 3.7m Europeans will officially join the ranks of the “foreign” living in Britain. Post-Brexit Britain will in a way be egalitarian: a hostile environment for everyone who isn’t British.

Maybe it’s only fair that Europeans discover what being treated as a “migrant” in western democracies feels like – their home countries, after all, have various ways of “treating” their own migrants, from walls and fences to detention centres and camps.

Yet Brexit is unique: what used to be home for European citizens has ceased to be. Migration is usually about people moving to a foreign land. This time, it will be about a land where people already live (and, in some cases, have for decades) turning foreign under their feet. A sudden, inescapable lack of movement, and an end to the freedom that previously allowed it.

The situation is not yet clear, but things have already shifted. Tourists with EU passports already face “Where are you staying?”, “For how long?”, “Who with?” interrogations at UK customs.

I actually moved to the UK twice: first in 2012 to study with the Erasmus programme, and again in 2016 to work. As a French student, moving to London was only slightly more difficult than moving to, say, Lyon, and the language-related challenges made it all the more exciting. As a young graduate, I got a job, an NI number and a bank account with only my French ID card to show as proof of my identity. On both occasions, the question of whether I belonged was irrelevant. Of course I did – I was from the European Union.

In between these two London stints, I lived in the US. There it was obvious: I was foreign. Nothing was trusted: not my identity (“please renew your passport”), not my health (“you’ll have to take this vaccination again”), not my financial situation (“please provide proof of all your savings”). My visa had a clear expiration date, by which time I should be gone if I did not want trouble to ensue, thank you very much. In the US I was always an alien, and that was fine: it had always been the deal.

But I was not an alien when I moved back to London. I will, however, have become one by the time I inevitably leave.

• Pauline Bock is a French journalist based in Britain