How Brexit created a new European diaspora

Brussels: Kirsten Whitehouse was watching the news on TV in the early hours of the morning when the hard, cold fact that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union properly sank in.

As the day after the Brexit referendum dawned on June 24, 2016, Whitehouse, 48, says she was “flabbergasted” by the result. Sitting, incredulous, in her home in St Albans, an affluent town just north of London, questions about her future began to flood her mind.

“I had to provide for my children! What if I wasn’t allowed to work in the UK anymore? I was so upset,” says Whitehouse, who was born and raised in Germany before moving to the UK as a young woman.

“The news of the Brexit vote hit me so hard. We had all absolutely thought it was impossible that it would happen.”

Whitehouse was just one of 3.5 million Europeans who had made the UK their home, comfortable in the belief that freedom of movement within the EU made this a safe option. Now, overnight, they faced uncertainty about their future. Would they even be able to continue living in the UK? What about their jobs, their children at school?

They weren’t the only ones blind-sided by the referendum result. It appeared the government was completely unprepared for it as well.

“There was so much confusion. The government didn’t make anything clear at all. I was really scared,” Whitehouse says. “It took me years to truly understand the implications.”

Now, seven years later, she is one of many EU citizens who have tried to forge closer legal bonds with the UK than they had in 2016 – taking steps to register for settlement in the country or even naturalise as full British citizens. Yet many say they feel more vulnerable than they did before Brexit. In Whitehouse’s case, she has opted to apply for full British citizenship to safeguard her rights, but she feels she has been forced to do this in a state of anxiety, rather than one of happiness about becoming a British citizen.

Whitehouse first came to the UK in 1994 to work as a nanny and moved for good two years later after finishing her education. “I fell in love with life in the UK,” she says. She went on to have a career in marketing and events organisation, not to mention getting married and having a family. Her two boys, Richard and Leo, are 17 and 19.

Whitehouse now runs her own business, Wolf Approach Fitness. “I have always loved how the UK offers [lots of support] to follow your heart and set up a business,” she says. “It’s one of the many reasons I have always considered the UK my true home while also very much considering myself a European citizen.”

She never thought it necessary to become a British citizen – why bother? Her generation had only ever known freedom of movement within Europe, a central tenet of the EU that meant she could move to the UK without a visa and almost immediately enjoy close to the same rights as Britons.