However the government sugarcoats the EU settlement scheme, European citizens living in the UK will now be seen as outsiders
“We asked for workers, we got human beings instead,” was how the Swiss author Max Frisch summed up the “guest worker” schemes that helped wealthy European countries rebuild their economies after the second world war. His quip lives on because it expresses the absurdity of societies that treat immigration as purely a question of economic need, reducing people to units that can be moved here and there as capital sees fit.
However partial and flawed it may be, the EU’s system of internal free movement is an attempt to escape that trap. In stripping away the obstacles and restrictions that continue to govern migration for most of the world, it is an acknowledgment that when people move, they develop new attachments to the places they come to call home and to the people they come to call neighbours – and a wager that the best way to grow a shared sense of belonging is to make that process as easy as possible.
