In the months leading to the referendum and during the negotiations that followed, anti-EU and anti-immigration sentiments were evident across the British mainstream media.
Over several months of bilateral negotiations that followed the vote, EU citizens made their concerns, anxieties and frustrations heard through social media and political activism, lobbying their MPs, joining existing civil society organisations, and creating new ones. For example, between 20, live births among EU mothers in London have roughly stayed the same - only marginally declined from 17.52 to 17.18 per cent of the total number of live births in London, with Poland, Romania, Germany and Lithuania among the top 10 countries of birth for non-UK mothers in the city (ONS, 2021 see also Lessard-Phillips & Sigona, 2019).ĭespite vague reassurances from politicians during the referendum campaign, the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum – which saw the ‘Leave’ campaign winning popular support across every region in England and Wales with the exception of Greater London – led to an extended period of uncertainty for over three million EU citizens living in the UK concerning their legal status and rights after Brexit. Despite Britain’s exit from the EU, its new geopolitical orientation (towards a more ‘Global Britain’) and the new immigration regime that has come to replace the EU’s freedom of movement, this diversification process has continued. These changes have intensified and shaped the process of ‘diversification of diversity’ captured in the late 2000s by anthropologist Steve Vertovec in his seminal work on superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007).
London’s population changed rapidly following EU enlargement in the 2000s in terms of its size, the variety and number of nationalities it hosts, and its socio-demographic profile (Lessard-Phillips & Sigona, 2018). It is also home to roughly one-third of the entire EU citizen population living in the UK. London hosts by far the largest population of non-national EU citizens in Europe.
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