Emigrating to UK - Brexit
My wife and I are Belgian citizens have been thinking about emigrating to the UK for quite some time now. We have two children, ten year old twins. I’m a translator, my wife’s a primary school teacher.
My wife’s half-English, British dad, Belgian mum, I’m 100% Belgian. My wife’s parents have been living in Belgium for almost 30 years now but her grandparents still live in the UK (Enfield, London). We travel to the UK about 5 times a year and have been doing so for the last decade or so. During that time, we have really fallen in love with the UK, hence our desire to emigrate one day.
We had already started to gather information about housing, schools, finding jobs etc. in the UK. Personally, I have already been in contact with potential employers and have received some positive feedback. I don’t believe my wife would have any trouble finding a suitable job either so I am convinced that on a ‘practical’ level, we more or less have everything covered… or had.
However, with the recent Brexit results, I have started to worry that everything might not be as simple anymore. I’m not worried about the short term effects : we should be able to travel back and forth as we’ve always done. But what after that ? To travel, we will most likely need passports or a visa, so we’d have to apply for that. More paperwork and costs. If and when we decide to emigrate at a certain point in time in the future, we most certainly would have to follow very complicated procedures and I don’t think we could even be sure of being accepted in.
My wife has therefore been looking for information to acquire British passports for all of us, i.e. this would give us all double nationality, Belgian and British. We have already received information by telephone (someone from the British government called my wife), saying that it won’t be a problem for my wife or our children. However, I would have to follow a different procedure. With the way things are now (the UK is still a part of the EU), I don’t think I would have any real problems getting a UK passport. That’s why we’re trying to do it now, as soon as possible, because it might avoid problems later on if and when we want to emigrate for good.
Or am I looking at this the wrong way ? Provided I can obtain the British nationality, will it actually make things easier when traveling/emigrating ? Or am I just too naive about all this ?