The British courts have required the Government to grant permanent residence to all citizens of the European Union who were established before Brexit and are entitled to it, without the need to force them to submit a second application that causes them uncertainty and puts them in jeopardy. potentially helpless conditions.
The situation affects 2.7 million Europeans who had been in the United Kingdom for less than five years when Brexit was signed. London granted them a kind of temporary residence (pre-settled status) which, once they had completed that five-year period in the country, would become permanent after submitting a new application. An organization that defends the interests of EU citizens argued before the courts that this procedure did not respond either in letter or in spirit to the signed agreements, and the High Court (one echelon below the Supreme Court) gave it yesterday the reason.
Especially affected are 200,000 people whose status, which gives them the right to live, work, study and go to the British public health system, will expire next August if it is not renewed. "In that case -says the sentence- they would automatically become illegal aliens, dealing with a criminal matter and not merely a procedural one as the Government alleges."
Although in theory it is only necessary to submit an application to change temporary residence to permanent one (settled status), in practice it can happen that it is done after the deadline or that the Ministry of the Interior, in the current climate of hostility towards immigrants, to reduce their number (half a million a year), put obstacles to grant it.
The judges pointed out that the Brexit agreements give clear and specific legal protections to citizens of the European Union who were established in Britain before the break, and that they subject millions of them to a new and complex bureaucratic procedure of uncertain outcome. (the presentation of a new application) is a breach of what was agreed at the time with Brussels.
56% of Britons (including one in five who voted for Brexit) now believe that the decision to leave the EU was a mistake, although only 25% are in favor of rethinking a traumatic and divisive decision that it has cost the United Kingdom, according to independent studies, four points and 120,000 million euros of gross domestic product, and 60,000 million euros in tax revenue. It is estimated that the country needs one million immigrants a year to fill job vacancies and pay pensions.
