For over 1.3 million British citizens residing in the remaining 27 EU member states, the UK’s hard Brexit on 31 January 2020, had confirmed many of their worst fears. Since the Brexit vote in 2016, British citizens have been increasingly anxious about what a Brexit, without a clear negotiation of British citizens’ legal rights to residence, work and free movement in the EU, would bring. While an 11-month transition period allows most Brits time to sort out their paperwork until 31 December 2020, EU member states have different regulatory frameworks on how British foreign residents will be treated.
While some countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Estonia have extended the grace period to remain and apply for a new residence permit for up to a year longer, some other states, like Austria, stipulated that applications for a new permit had to be lodged within six months after Brexit day.
Further, while permit applications in the Netherlands incur a fee of EUR 58, it’s a whopping EUR 210 per permit in Austria, and another EUR 195 per dependent child up to age six.
Lastly, while most states require permanent residence applicants to demonstrate at least five years of uninterrupted, lawful residence, in countries like France and Spain this is difficult, as most of the 180,000 and 300,000, respectively, residing Brits never had to officially register as residents.
However, despite variation in regulations, one thing is clear: most EU-member states have established different rules for UK citizens’ residence permit eligibility. Depending on whether they arrived either pre- or post-Brexit, the latter will face significant hurdles to acquiring work and residence permits for the first time, just as regular third-country nationals do.
Further, some states like Portugal, Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic, have made unmistakably clear that in return for accommodating British citizens, they expect reciprocity regarding their own countrymen living and working abroad in Britain.
Restrictions hit particularly hard in Switzerland, which agreed to continuing residence and work rights of the roughly 41,000 thousand UK citizens living in Switzerland but now applies an annual quota of no more than 3,500 available long- and short-term residence permits for newly arriving British citizens.
Switzerland’s numerical cap is not surprising – Swiss citizens voted by referendum in early 2014 to restrict immigration from Europe, and the hard Brexit offers now one opportunity to do so.
Yet, by far the most notable development of the Brexit insecurity is the drastic increase in UK nationals taking-up EU citizenship. Faced with mounting insecurity over access to residency, work and mobility, many British expats have rushed to apply for EU passports.
On average, EU countries have experienced a five- to seven-fold increase in citizenship application by British citizens. The numbers of Brits being granted citizenship have notably skyrocketed in Germany (from only 622 in 2015 to 7,500 in 2017) and Ireland (from roughly 5,000 in 2015 to 49,000 in 2019) – two countries that make it comparatively easy for Brits to apply for citizenship due to provisions that facilitate eligibility for those that can prove Irish or German ancestry (applicable, e.g. for those whose ancestors fled to Britain from Nazi Germany).
However, there are notable exceptions to the naturalisation boom. Both in Spain, which hosts more than 300,000 British nationals, and Austria, with around 10,700 British expats, less than one per cent of British residents have applied for citizenship. This comes as no surprise, considering that both countries require giving up British citizenship upon naturalisation, a minimum of 10 years permanent residence and passing a rigorous integration exam.
These developments reveal not only an instrumentalist, albeit understandable, motive for naturalisation, but also that earlier swansongs of citizenship’s relevance in light of near-universal residence rights, might have been premature.
The uncertainty of the post-Brexit political environment, the diverging national regulations and the potential for political conflict, have led many Brits to not only rely on securing residence permits, but ultimately to pursue the safer bet of citizenship to anchor themselves in their host-countries and the EU.