British nationals living in Berlin have been given reassurance that an urgent registration process to secure legal status will be in place for them in the event of the UK leaving the EU with no deal.
Worried Britons who attended a meeting hosted by the British embassy have said they felt relief that the state authorities were able to go further than the European Commission, whose no deal planning, announced this week, made them feel “abandoned”.
There are an estimated 100,000 Britons living in Germany, the majority of them working. But they fear that post-Brexit, they will be treated as third-country nationals, last in the queue for jobs after Germans and EU nationals, as is the current legal priority for anyone applying for work who comes from a country outside the bloc.
With 18,000 British nationals living in the state, Berlin recently overtook North Rhine-Westphalia as the state with the most UK nationals, the ambassador said in his opening remarks.
Engelhard Manzanke, the head of the Foreigners Registration Office at the Berlin state office for citizens, told Britons that he could not say what kind of residence status UK nationals would get when the UK leaves the EU, nor what documents would be required.
But he promised that the immigration office would clarify the situation as soon as possible and be “very generous” with British people in Berlin who have to go through the federal legislative process to establish their new status.
He told them it would take eight weeks for the immigration office in Berlin to issue residence permits and this would not be possible before 29 March. However, he reassured Britons in the audience that the city had an “excellent, flexible team which coped with the refugee crisis two years ago”.
He told them by the second week in January, Britons could register their personal details on an official website to help establish that they have a continued right to live and work in the state on 30 March in the event of no deal.
One British national at the meeting said they felt that at last someone had listened to them after two years of anxiety.
“His statement is remarkable, in my view because he, as the first of the heads of the immigration offices in Germany, is willing to come out at this stage and put Brits’ minds at rest,” said the source.
Earlier this week, the French also sought to reassure British nationals in France of their status post-Brexit.
Nathalie Loiseau, the Europe minister, said France would guarantee the residence, employment and welfare rights of the 160,000 British citizens living there provided that Britain offered the same guarantees to French expatriates.
The British in Europe campaign group said UK nationals in the EU were facing “a rough landing” in the absence of a deal. Guaranteeing residency rights and issuing documents by 30 March would be a “massive and overwhelming task in some countries”, said the group’s co-chair, Jane Golding.
European governments are being urged by Brussels to take a “generous” approach to protect the rights of 1 million Britons living in the European Union if the UK crashes out of Brexit talks without a deal.