I'm Irish and my gf is German. I'll be fine from the paperwork perspective in all probability, but my gf doesn't want to be in a situation where she needs to avoid living outside UK to retain right to return to UK - we have a house here. And neither of us has any interest in switching citizenship.
But more importantly, we don't want to be living in a country in a downward, inward decline. Brexit isn't going to solve the problems that disaffected leavers voted for, and I think it's going to get worse - Britain may get even more virulent demagogues. If we have children, we don't want them to grow up in an illiberal society, or be educated in this kind of a system.
Things aren't great elsewhere either, for sure. That's why it's so fascinating.
People aren't being made to leave but a lot of them are leaving because it's too much hassle to stay. They have to pay money to get a visa to stay and so they are saying they will leave instead as too much hassle. This is the general viewpoint of EU workers in general.
Great you say, more jobs for the English. But now the businesses have to pay a higher wager and/or increase their costs which are passed down to us. Now we have to pay more, but we aren't getting any extra money and due to austerity it's even worse.
You make it sound like everyone who immigrated from the Windies from the 50s to the 70s has been specifically and vindictively booted out when ... well, nothing like that has happened at all.
Sure, there have been quite a few unfortunate and well-publicised outlier cases of people situationally caught between bureaucratic cracks, but as someone who lives in London, I assure you that thousands of long-since immigrated grandparents aren't getting booted out to satisfy some arbitrary ‘anti-immigration’ whim.
It's a mess for sure, but I'm not sure it's as you appear to be trying to paint.
