Oct 13 email blast from the Home Office - EU citizens

"The fifth round of the negotiation between the EU and UK concluded yesterday. We are closer to agreeing all elements of the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and the reciprocal rights of UK citizens living in the EU – but there is more discussion required. On key issues, such as the broad framework of residence rights for EU citizens and their family members, social security entitlements and reciprocal healthcare, the UK and EU have largely reached agreement.  On remaining areas, both the UK and EU are focussing on providing certainty for citizens as quickly as possible. Discussions this week have narrowed the focus to the key remaining issues for negotiations. The UK has also provided further information on its settled status scheme to be introduced next year. It will be streamlined, digital and low cost. As we have said previously, you do not need a document now to prove that you are resident in the UK.

For those who already have EU permanent residence documents the process will be very straightforward, with greatly reduced or zero cost to applicants to update their status under the new scheme.  The talks also explored ways to fulfil the Prime Minister’s commitment to implement the Withdrawal Treaty fully into UK law, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-florence-speech-a-new-era-of-cooperation-and-partnership-between-the-uk-and-the-eu ensuring consistent interpretation through UK courts being able to take into account CJEU judgements. 

We want to reach agreement on all areas as soon as we can, providing certainty for citizens. The EU Council is meeting next week to discuss whether or not there has been sufficient progress in the current talks to move onto discussion of wider issues. Whatever the EU Council’s decision, safeguarding the status of EU citizens in the UK and UK nationals in the EU will remain a priority for the UK. As the Prime Minister said this week, “we want you to stay”.

Our negotiating position continues to be based on the proposal we outlined in June: safeguarding the position of EU citizens in the UK and UK nationals in the EU, with updates provided as the negotiations progress. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safeguarding-the-position-of-eu-citizens-in-the-uk-and-uk-nationals-in-the-eu

We will write and update you further as soon as there is more to say.

Yours sincerely

Home Office"


Ehhh?

Aside from combining paragraphs, I haven't changed the content of this message. Basically, it says nothing new?

 

Aside from combining paragraphs, I haven't changed the content of this message. Basically, it says nothing new?

IMO, it's not worth reading any of this now until we know if there is a trade deal as this is just part of those talks. The EU's Article 50 clearly states that all obligation to the EU ends when a country leaves the EU, something that the EU now seems to regret putting. 

It took the old men of Brussels 9 years to get to this present stage with the Canada trade deal and that was with the UK pushing them along.

Yeah if TM wanted us all to stay so bad this wouldn't have been such a damn issue. That being said if there is no deal then no one will want to stay anyway if the economy goes off the cliff.

Im also waiting to see something formal as there is no point in discussing anything otherwise. Who knows there could be another GE or referendum yet 

Its enough to make you ill though. Planning contingency now since we still have time.

Yeah, contingency planning is good, for sure.    We have a few lined up.

If it goes off the cliff, the dollar will be good against the pound and we'll do ok. Or, rather, I'd do ok. The Daughter, who will want to be launching her career, might not do that well. So we might have to move on then.

I appreciate them sending updates, but it would be good if there was something contextually important in the emails, not just the same-old-same-old.

Yeah if TM wanted us all to stay so bad this wouldn't have been such a damn issue.

Except that that was Germany's Merkel's fault. Last year May made an offer for the several millions of EEA citizens and non-EEA citizens in the UK using EEA regs and all Merkel had to do was to agree to the same for just the 1 million Brits using free movement to live in the other 26 EEA countries. This part should have been over last year.

That offer was a massive gain for the EU when you look at the millions of people involved, but Merkel put it on the back burner saying she wanted it to be part of the Brexit talks instead. Judging from the results in the German election, it would seem Merkel made the right choice for her own career to concentrate on her elections.

I don’t know if you have been watching what has happened in Germany, but Merkel took a massive hit and will have a lot to do to form a coalition government with 3 other parties especially as they all have different views. The EU man, who gave up his Presidency in the EU to be the leader of Germany instead of Merkel, suffered a humiliating defeat too. The anti euro and anti immigration party AfD, made it to the German parliament for the first time because of their large percentage of the vote.

That being said if there is no deal then no one will want to stay anyway if the economy goes off the cliff.

The EU won't be in that good a state either if there is no trade deal. Even Hungary has waded in now saying that Brussels are just giving all that trade away to the US by delaying trade talks, when the EU countries can't afford to lose those billions from the UK. Only two of the 27 EU countries buy more from the UK than they sell to the UK.

It all depends on how far Brussels are prepared to deck the EU, to try to punish the UK for leaving, in order to try to stop other EU countries from leaving. Switzerland have already withdrawn their long standing application to join the EU after a public vote on free movement.

Brussels seem more concerned over how much money they will lose. This done shortly after the UK's leave vote, at a time when May was offering to let most of the EEA citizens stay if they were lawfully in the UK.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/brexit-to-cost-european-union-billions-a-1111724.html

The EU did try to stop the UK starting trade talks with other countries before Brexit day, but they couldn't as they forgot to put that in their Article 50.

Yeah, well.

We went ahead and sent in the Daughter's stuff for a residence card just prior to her family permit expiring anyway, again. I used a check to pay for it, and it was cashed on the 11th, so if they bounce the file again it won't be because they didn't get their payment for it.

I would assume she'll hear about going for her biometrics by December.... And possibly having the card by April. If we're lucky. And probably by then they will have established some other process we need to do. But she needs the darned RC to be able to travel without risking being turned away at the border, so off it's gone.

Yeah, well.

You might not think that all that will affect you, but you are using free movement. It has been just been announced that it looks like about 60% of the voters in the Austrian elections have also voted against free movement too. The parties who are predicted to come first and second, both ran their campaigns based on their citizens concerns about coping with the high numbers of immigrants.

If the predicitons are right, if will likely mean a coaltion government between these two parties.

What happens one place or another, we have to float like a cork above it. I don't care for brownshirts, but I can't stop them, either. As long as we still have options for places to go, I'm good. When that narrows down and the writing on the wall indicates, I'll have to make a judgment call and go with the one that's best for us (or me, as the situation is at that time). Then, like everyone else, I'll deal with what comes next.

In the meantime, we've sent off for a piece of paper that is pretty much pointless, other than as the holder of said paper the Daughter hopefully won't have hassles at the border if she needs to travel and tries to get back into the country without me. Eventually they're going to make us send off again for more documents, with more money, to get some other pieces of paper. And I doubt that will be the last of it. There will always be some other bureaucratic hurdle. It's the nature of the beast.

My one real concern over Brexit at this point is the fact that she's a non-EU national, even though she's here as a direct dependent of an EU national. They've said in writing that they would propose that she would be treated as an EU national, assuming the magic yet-to-be-disclosed cutoff date is favorable for her.  Whether or not they actually honor that... I have no great sense of confidence that they will; however, it's the only game in town, so we play it.

I wish they'd publish the da&ned cutoff date so we can get on with things, rather than leaving us hanging. All the soothing memos in the world do us no good if we don't know the date they're going to use to slam the door. If it's the date they triggered Article 50, we need to make plans to leave. Period. If it's May 1, 2017 or after, then we don't.  I'd rather not have to be managing a long-distance move at the very last minute. Been there, done that, and its not on my list of "wanna-dos" again.

What happens one place or another, we have to float like a cork above it. I don't care for brownshirts, but I can't stop them, either.

It's not just one place or another.

Eventually they're going to make us send off again for more documents, with more money, to get some other pieces of paper.

You only pay a fraction of that cost or nothing at all, for any work carried out by UK's UKVI as that is what the EU says.

In the UK, those that use a service pay for it so that the taxpayer doesn’t have this burden and UKVI is no different. Therefore all those using UK immigration rules, pay for all the millions of EEA citizens and non-EEA citizens in the UK using the EU rules.
i.e. ILR  (UK immigration rules), cost 2k plus. The EU call their ILR, PR and to apply for that for British citizenship only costs them £65 as that is the maximum the EU will allow. Yet often, checking that an EEA citizen/their EEA citizen sponsor has kept to the EEA regs to be lawfully in the UK for 5 years, takes a lot longer than checking an application from someone on UK immigration rules.

Whether or not they actually honor that... I have no great sense of confidence that they will; however, it's the only game in town, so we play it.

There is nothing to honour as the EU’s Article 50 states that all obligations towards the EU end when a country leaves the EU. Your daughter is using the 2008 European Court of Justice Ruling that said non-EEA citizens can enter the EU and use the EU’s  free movement too.

As stated, Germany’s Merkel refused the offer the UK made in 2016, for the millions in the UK lawfully who entered using the EEA rules, as long as the same applied to the 1 million Brits who are in the other 27 EEA countries. Which means that that offer is now just a proposal under any UK/EU trade deal. However, many of these will have citizenship before Brexit anyway.

I wish they'd publish the da&ned cutoff date so we can get on with things, rather than leaving us hanging. All the soothing memos in the world do us no good if we don't know the date they're going to use to slam the door. If it's the date they triggered Article 50, we need to make plans to leave. Period. If it's May 1, 2017 or after, then we don't.  I'd rather not have to be managing a long-distance move at the very last minute. Been there, done that, and its not on my list of "wanna-dos" again.

It was always going to be a waiting game as Brussels never move quickly, but you and many others have chosen to take that gamble when moving to the UK in the past few months under EU rules. You were never going to make the 6 years of lawful stay using EU laws and then safeguard your stay after Brexit by being granted British citizenship, as there wouldn’t be six years before Brexit .

It's not just one place or another.

Yeah, it pretty much is. We'd like to stay here. But if we can't, we can't. We'd move on. If Austria or the rest of the EU goes brownshirt, it'd be no worse than here or the USA. At present, if the entire EU block went anti-immigrant, I'd have two places to go (not counting using the Irish card for staying in the UK) and the Daughter would only have one. We're hoping to have a little more leeway than that. If Scotland went indy, that might make another option, since Scotland would be our preference anyway.

You only pay a fraction of that cost or nothing at all, for any work carried out by UK's UKVI as that is what the EU says.

In the UK, those that use a service pay for it so that the taxpayer doesn’t have this burden and UKVI is no different. Therefore all those using UK immigration rules, pay for all the millions of EEA citizens and non-EEA citizens in the UK using the EU rules.
i.e. ILR  (UK immigration rules), cost 2k plus. The EU call their ILR, PR and to apply for that for British citizenship only costs them £65 as that is the maximum the EU will allow. Yet often, checking that an EEA citizen/their EEA citizen sponsor has kept to the EEA regs to be lawfully in the UK for 5 years, takes a lot longer than checking an application from someone on UK immigration rules.

So far. And after the UK leaves the EU, all bets are off. We won't have the 5 years, so there's no telling what kind of fees they'll hit us with. They may be "reasonable" or they be exorbitant, no way to know. It could be one card, it could be something every year, or god-only-knows-what. Kind of depends on who is in power at the time, I'd say.

There is nothing to honour as the EU’s Article 50 states that all obligations towards the EU end when a country leaves the EU. Your daughter is using the 2008 European Court of Justice Ruling that said non-EEA citizens can enter the EU and use the EU’s  free movement too.

Once the UK is no longer in the EU, there are no guarantees on anything - the UK can do as it pleases. I have seen proposals from the UK government (and that's all they are at this point) that the Daughter will be treated as an EU citizen even though she is not. If so, great. If they decide down the road that they won't honor that and won't treat her as such, there's not diddly we can do about it.

As stated, Germany’s Merkel refused the offer the UK made in 2016, for the millions in the UK lawfully who entered using the EEA rules, as long as the same applied to the 1 million Brits who are in the other 27 EEA countries. Which means that that offer is now just a proposal under any UK/EU trade deal. However, many of these will have citizenship before Brexit anyway.

Matters not to us, water under the bridge, or not applicable, as the case may be.

It was always going to be a waiting game as Brussels never move quickly, but you and many others have chosen to take that gamble when moving to the UK in the past few months under EU rules. You were never going to make the 6 years of lawful stay using EU laws and then safeguard your stay after Brexit by being granted British citizenship, as there wouldn’t be six years before Brexit .

I was never counting on it, no. I was going to, had I need to do it, use my "settled" status as an Irish citizen for myself. The Daughter is skating down a loophole. We may have found another that makes the whole issue moot, but won't know for the better part of a year if it'll work or not.

I had put my career wheels in motion to get here long before the referendum, and we'd applied for the family permit well before the Article 50 trigger point.  At this point, I don't give a rat's hiney what they negotiate, as long as they give us an indication of whether our staying here is worth the time and continuing investment or not. If they are going to use March 29, 2017 as the cutoff date ok, then we know what we need to plan for down the road. If they're using March 2019, we're cool with that. To date, I have seen no indication whatsoever of what the UK government wants. They make a lot of noises about not wanting to leave EU citizens hanging, but they're doing a pretty good job of doing just that.

Then again, if it's a "hard" Brexit, we might be dealing with the Scottish government, instead.    I could deal with that - the few times we were in England we weren't feeling particularly welcome.  The Scots have treated us as "family" since we first set foot on the ground.

Yeah, it pretty much is.

No, it really isn't. There is plenty on the internet on all this. As one US financier/statesperson? was saying the other day when he was talking about Apple and Ireland, that if the EU insists on free movement then the EU should have paid for it as they knew some countries would be affected by this.

It could be one card, it could be something every year, or god-only-knows-what.

It won't be a card as that is what the EU has. The UK has “visas”. This is not the first time the UK has ended a type of free movement to the UK. In the 60s the UK could no longer cope with the uncontrolled numbers of low skilled in the UK from Commonwealth countries and that ended with the Immigration Act 1971. It’s still the same Act that the UK uses today.

These talks on this are all a bit of a moot point anyway as about 8 years ago the UK said to not come to the UK for what you can take, but for what you can give to the UK. Now these new laws are finally passed so that the UK can start to make changes to who can use the NHS bill free and to the welfare state.

I was going to, had I need to do it, use my "settled" status as an Irish citizen for myself.

?? From what I have read in your posts, you have always said you were  going to use EU rules because of your non-EEA citizen adult daughter, even if that meant going to another EEA country with her under the EU's free movement. As I mentioned to farmgirl when I had asked if her husband had just got an Irish passport to move the UK from the US with his non-EEA citizen family, those doing that are not regarded in the same way as the Irish who come from Ireland, for obvious reasons.

The talks in Parliament around the Immigration Act 1971 was whether to still help the Irish government. Up to that point, although Ireland were not part of the Commonwealth, Irish citizens had been granted the same rights as Commonwealth citizens in the UK and now this type of free movement was ending. The UK parliament decided to still help the Irish government but that this would  be for those Irish coming from Ireland. I think you might find that it’s these who are not treated as a foreign citizen, while that agreement is in place.

With that in mind, I think that you might be regarded as the same as anyone else who gets citizenship and a passport from any EEA country so that they can move to the UK, an EEA citizen using the EU's free movement. You would need to check this if this is now part of your plans as I’m not sure.

This could be another moot point though if the other EEA countries decide to stop Ireland having this because their citizens are no longer allowed it. The EU has equality laws.

Sorry for the confusion. The following is written under severe influence of NyQuil. 

I have had Irish citizenship for well over a quarter of a century, so it wasn't obtained solely to get the Daughter into the UK or any other EU country. At one point in the 1990s I had wanted to move to Ireland and did extensive (and expensive legal) investigations of the logistics. I could not move us there when the Daughter was a minor due to California custody laws, even though we (and the courts) couldn't locate the absent parent for the necessary permissions.  Bottom line, if we could have moved over before she was of legal age, or after, we'd not be having this conversation. She and I would be Irish citizens and there would be nothing to discuss here.

But for the now, unless the EU goes completely anti-immigrant, if the Daughter is tossed out of the UK after Brexit we'd probably both go to the Netherlands, or potentially to the north of France. Both appear willing to allow her in as my dependent/family member.  While I can go to Ireland to live, at present she cannot - unless we can get citizenship for her, which would be hella-tricky to do since they don't normally recognize adult dependent children, although it's not completely out of the question. (Things seem to have changed slightly since the last time we took a run at that.)  If she got a funded PhD program in Ireland or somewhere else in the EU... if Brexit went badly, it'd be an option. If Brexit was favorable, she'd need to look very carefully at her options on graduation. Living in Scotland again, and becoming a citizen, would probably be not in the cards for her if she took that offer. I'd do a lot of sighing, but it'd be her choice.

The Irish legal eagle I consulted last year informed me that Irish is Irish is Irish, as far as "settled in the UK" goes. [Unless they change it, which is always a lurking threat.] Realistically, when it comes down to it, I'd probably go with the Daughter anyway. She's all the family I've got. What am I going to do here on my own, spend my days counting the leaves falling and the number of squirrels mooching my peanuts  over in the Botanic on my daily walks? I really, really, ~really~ like it in Glasgow, but ?

So, if we're tossed out, we go to the EU. Unless the EU won't take us. In which case we have no place else to go but back to the USA until other opportunities arise. All of that is completely out of our hands, at present.  We will simply have to bob up like a cork, and float on whatever flood descends on us. I thank the gods we have options that do not include being returned to a third-world country where our lives might be in danger. (Or, more danger than on a typical trigger-happy day in the USA.)

From a position paper I read recently I understand that there are an estimated 500,000 legally-present, non-EU people in situations similar to the Daughter's, as of the time of the writing of the article. (Not including students.) They will not have 5 years' residence as of March 2019. Even with the tossed-around extra two years' transition period, many will not have 5 years at the end of that time. And, at that point, they'll have to pay again whatever charge the UK chooses to levy to be considered for further time in-country to make that magic 5-year mark. Assuming they are allowed to stay at all. All we, and anyone else, really, have are "assumptions" about what "might" happen at this point, and it's rather challenging planning for the future when you have no freaking clue what "the rules" will be. (No wonder businesses are getting seriously nervous!)

Although we applied for and received the Daughter's permission to enter well prior to the Article 50 trigger, we did not physically set foot in the UK until a month later. So the "cutoff date" is critical for us and it's not being publicly discussed. We are, in effect, like so many others in similar circumstances, hanging out in a very stiff breeze.  If what TM said publicly is true and anyone "who is here now legally" can stay after Brexit, there's no problem. [Until the next speech, when her (or her successor's) tune changes.    ]  In any event, flapping here is better than going back to Trump's America, which is more and more unrecognizable. 

And if they drive the UK over the cliff with a no-deal Brexit?  The Daughter says she has met quite a number of people who only voted "no" on IndyRef because they were afraid an independent Scotland would not be allowed to remain in the EU. Apparently there've been several statements recently by EU officials stating the Scotland would be more than welcome in the EU, if it went Indy. So, one has to wonder what Scotland will do if it's a hard Brexit and the powers that should be devolved to them are not. (Apparently there's history there.    )  IndyRef was only defeated by a very slim majority the last time. I am given to understand that there are a lot of people who voted "no" who are now seriously ticked off by what has/has not happened since that time.

But on the larger scale, this is all like watching a train wreck in slow motion.  We will always bob along on the top of it, one way or the other. But for so many people who are about to, if you'll excuse mah French, probably get screwed, it's just a sad, sad thing. Especially for those who have no clue what's coming and who cannot get off the the tracks.