Millions of foreign workers face an uncertain future

LONDON — A tsunami of uncertainty has engulfed Ms 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? Leave 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,” said a visibly tense Ms Woydyla, 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 any more. 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, changing sleepy English towns such as Boston into Baltic enclaves, filling supermarket shelves across the nation with Polish lager and Wiejska sausage.

“I personally cannot tell what’s going to change for me,” said Ms Andrea Cordaro, a 21-year-old 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.”

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

“I’ll bet a lot of people are applying,” she said, explaining that she had 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. My life is here.”

At workplaces and schools across the country, managers have sent out emails to worried foreign staffers and students, assuring them that — for now — nothing has changed.

“The formal process for leaving the European Union will take at least two years,” said Oxford University in one such statement. “Our staff and students can be assured that, in the short term, we anticipate no disruption to employment or study.”

In the long term though, the lives of the estimated three 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 baristas, 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 former-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.

“I trust that the British government will appreciate the contribution the Poles are bringing into the development of the British Islands, into their social and cultural life,” said Mr Duda.

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.

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

“My entire existence is now upside down and I’m not sure what this means for my professional future,” said 40-year-old tour guide Gabriel Fawcett, who works in Germany and several other European countries. “Overnight, the mothership has left me. If I want to continue the career I have built for myself, I will have to get German citizenship.”

In the southern Spanish coastal town of Benalmadena, Welsh pub owner Wayne Greenhalgh, who moved to Spain six years ago, said the result left him trapped between two worlds.

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh no’,” he said. “I’m proud to be British, but I’m part of this community now. I’m European, too.”

Mr Greenhalgh, who said the campaigning had left most of his concerns unanswered, admitted he is as puzzled now about his future as he was two months ago.

While having no plans to move back to his home country, he is concerned about what this will mean for his pension, his savings in pounds and, ultimately, his livelihood running a British pub catering to tourists from the UK.

“You want tourists feeling confident about spending money,” he said. “I think there’s a long way to go before we find out what’s going to happen.” AGENCIES