Romanians recently overtook the Irish and Indians as the second biggest immigrant community in the UK, but they are among the most vulnerable in the country after Brexit, according to a leading charity advocating for east Europeans in the UK.

Many fill vital jobs that keep Britain’s supermarket shelves stocked, the elderly in care homes fed, and hotel rooms clean, but there have been fears that social and economic isolation among those in the low-skills sector would prove a calamitous mix for the many who would wish to remain in the country after Brexit.

“The majority of EU citizens are not very well informed about Brexit and the settled status and Romanians are no exception. The language barrier, the fact that most of Romanian citizens don’t follow UK media at all, makes them quite vulnerable,” says Florina Tudose, an outreach worker with the East European Resource Centre, which has repeatedly raised concerns with the Home Office.

“From our field research and extensive outreach within the Romanian community, we’ve noticed that many Romanians think that the settled status will be an automatic process, that as long as they pay taxes and are law-abiding citizens, everything is going to be OK,” she says.

The Guardian accompanied Tudose to meet some of the Romanians in communities in two areas of north London and found these fears were borne out.

One woman, in her 40s, in a Romanian butcher’s shop explained she had no worries about Brexit.

“I lived in Italy for 17 years, I didn’t know if I was illegal, nobody cared, I wasn’t stopped once, why should it be any different here?,” she says.

Others wrongly believed the Home Office knew who they were and, as long as they paid taxes, registration would be automatic.

“They will send us letters,” one 20-something shop assistant tells Tudose. “I am not worried at all about Brexit, why should I be? I’ve been here nine years and pay taxes and they will see that,” she says, betraying an alarming lack of knowledge about the Home Office plans or the consequences of not registering, which could include deportation or denial of re-entry into the country after a holiday.

“Sadly,” says Tudose, “You hear this a lot. How are the Home Office going to get to these people? This is why we are worried.”

A closer look at the Romanians interviewed by the Guardian reveal that all have come to Britain to better their lives, not to take benefits.

Several parents tell heartbreaking stories about leaving children behind with grandparents, so desperate have they been to provide for their families.

Although Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship collapsed almost 30 years ago and Romania had record growth of 7% last year, communism has cast a long shadow and the country remains ranked as the second poorest EU nation in Europe.

Others complained that British people were ignorant about Romania and Romanians, with one protesting: “if Romania is as bad as the British think why has Prince Charles bought so much property there?”

Dragoș Grinici, the chef at the Romanian restaurant Hoinar in Dollis Hill, north London. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Dragoș Grinici, 37, chef

“What will England do without us?” says Dragoș, who works in a Romanian restaurant in Dollis Hill, north London, an area popular with Romanians.

He was lured to the UK from Germany by a large nursing home group in November 2016.

“British people accounted for just 10% of the staff. But they weren’t considered reliable. They would call in sick, especially after the weekends, and then the Romanians would be called to go in and cover for them. Half of the 35 staff were Romanian, just three or four were from the UK,” he says.

What will England do without us? Dragoș Grinici

“It wasn’t fair. Last year in November, December, during the bad weather, they all called in to say they couldn’t come in. There was only two centimetres of snow. I had to take my car and personally pick up other Romanians. We couldn’t not go to work. These are elderly people, some have dementia, in my country you are one with the elderly, you have responsibilities and you get that drummed into you. Our work ethic and sense of responsibility is higher than it is here.”

Asked what he thinks the British think about Romanians, Dragoș says elliptically. “Every shepherd has its black sheep, so do countries.” He is referring to the “criminals” in his community, who he says give “Romanians a bad name”.

He shows me videos of fancy cars and lavish mansions in his town Țăndărei, known as the “Beverley Hills for Romanian gangsters”. It is a narrative that fits well with Brexiters and one that is often heard in the Romanian community, says Tudose.

Dragoș, like others, sees himself as a highly mobile worker feeding his family back home where his wife and seven-year-old daughter still live.

“We don’t have any future in Romania because of the corruption,” he says.

Over the past 20 years Dragoș has lived in Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, Holland, Malta, Italy and Germany. He speaks five languages and thinks Britain would “be in trouble” if it pulled up the drawbridge to EU citizens.

“Where will they get the women for all the low-skilled jobs?” If we go home, who is going to do the jobs? It is a bit racist, but it is their own decision. We are all here to work, we pay taxes, to pay rent, we pay insurance, buy food, pay bank fees. There will be a price to pay.”

An Aldi supermarket worker. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

‘Hannah’, 26, warehouse worker

Hannah, who declined to be photographed or named, has been in Britain for two years and she is considering going home as she has only one friend in London.

She typifies the type of hard unsung work that is done on a daily basis by EU workers, mainly east European, to keep the shelves full in supermarkets, the rooms clean in hotels and the streets free of rubbish.

I had a target per hour to pick up 300 cases in a freezing cold warehouse 'Hannah'

She worked for 18 months in Aldi in Swindon shifting crates of chilled food.

Hannah says: “The job was terrible. It was very hard work, in a warehouse kept at between zero and two degrees. You had to work very hard every day, must pick up 2,000 boxes, boxes of milk, pizza, cooked meats, juice, yoghurt.

“I had a target per hour to pick up 300 cases, if you do not make that target you go home.

“You were put on trial for three months and if you didn’t make the 300 crates per hour every day you didn’t get a job. I was determined to get the job so I picked up 400 crates an hour, more than I needed.”

In her 18 months in the warehouse she says there was just one British worker. “He lasted three days.”

She hated the job she says and she was lonely, but she did it for the money, £12 an hour.

In a good week she could make close to £500, more than the monthly wage in Romania but the tyranny of poor employment options made it impossible to leave.

“It was a good rate, but one day I looked at myself in the safety shoes, gloves and hi-vis jacket and thought: I’m a healthy bright woman I can’t believe I am doing this.” She thought of going into cleaning, but then realised at £7 an hour “it wasn’t much”.

Roxana Bertolan, a team leader at Langdon Manor Farm. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Roxana Berlotan, 30, berry farm team leader

Roxy, as she is known, with a masters degree in agricultural engineering under her belt, first came to Britain for adventure. She has been working on the harvests in a berry farm in Kent since 2010. She didn’t intend to stay, but like many EU citizens in Britain, has settled here.

She is earning good money compared with what she could make back home, but she’s fed up with the way Romanians are treated, not on the farm, but by the wider community and is unsure of her future here.

If you speak Romanian in the supermarket, you can see it on people’s faces. They hate us Roxana Berlotan

She says: “I am happy here, I just don’t like it when people say: ‘You are Romanian, you come here just to take our jobs, you are gypsies, you take benefits’.

“I have not taken £1 here without working for it. Any English person who comes here and asks for a job at the farm, will get a job with open arms, but they are not coming and still people in this country say we are stealing their jobs.”

Raspberry pickers from Romania and Bulgaria pick the farm’s produce until nearly November. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Was she surprised by the vote to leave the EU?

“No,” she says, “because you can see it on people’s faces. They hate us. In the supermarket you see how they look at you when they hear you speak Romanian, it’s better just to shut up. They do not like us.”

Roxy says she has not experienced racism and stresses that her employers and all the English people on the farm “treat everyone equally”. The raspberry and soft fruit farm’s owner has frequently expressed fears that he will not be able to recruit staff after Brexit.

But she says the perception of Romanians in Britain is otherwise ugly.

“British people say they are not racist, but they think we are here as slaves just because we do this work and then they treat us like that. I don’t speak for me or mean the farm, but the general people.”

She says fewer Romanians are now coming to Britain as word has got back that it is not all a bed of roses for agricultural workers, despite the lure of good money.

Roxy, who is a team leader in the Kent berry farm, says she needs 20 more people to cope with this year’s crop “but they don’t come here” – British or eastern Europeans. “They don’t like the rain, the mud, the hard work”.

“If they want to come here to work hard, yes, they should come. But if they want to come here because of some romantic dream, no, it is hard, it is not easy, you’re not in your own country, British people are grumpy and cold towards you.”

Roxy arrived in the UK after the principle agricultural recruitment agency Concordia, offered her a job after she graduated with a primary degree in agronomy .

At the time a first job in Romania would have earned her £300 a month and with the promise of the same amount a week in England, she made the journey to Kent. It was hard work, but an exciting adventure, she explains.

Her day starts at 4am, when she gets up at the house she shares with her boyfriend in Sittingbourne. She is on the farm at 5.45am to lead her team of 40 through aisles and aisles of raspberry plants under polytunnels.

Then have a 15-minute tea break at 8.30am and continue to 11am when they have 30 minutes for lunch with a further tea break at 1.30pm. Normally the day ends at 3pm but with so much produce, they continue for another hour during the peak harvest.

By the time Roxy gets home at around 6pm she just has time to “shower, cook and eat and then go to bed around 8.30pm to 9.30pm”.

Despite the gruelling hours, she appreciates her life in Britain. She says: “I would like to stay here, it’s already our home in a way, but this Brexit, we are not sure we want to make a life here.

“Do we want to get a mortgage? We could get one, but next year they could say we can’t stay here, so we have no security.

“Sometimes you just want to pack your bags and leave and say: ‘Okay, I’ve had enough’.”

Cristina Nitscu, a hairdresser in Burnt Oak, London. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Cristina Nitscu, hairdresser

It wasn’t easy for Cristina to leave Romania – she needed to make money and had to leave her daughter at home in order to make it work.

“It was really hard. I didn’t know anyone here,” she says.

I don’t have time to go out. I see this as a time of my life for sacrifice Christina Nitscu

“I didn’t know much about Britain. I knew something about the Queen, I knew it was expensive, but that I would earn more money here.

“Then when I got here I realised it was not so easy to save.”

When asked if the savings are for her daughter, Cristina begins to cry. “It is very hard to be here without her. I need the money for her school. It is a very sensitive subject. It is a big sacrifice.

“It is why I am here to pay for my daughter to have private music, to learn foreign languages, she’s also learning taekwondo.

“If I wasn’t here she would have none of these things. I am doing this for her. I would like her to come here but because of Brexit I cannot be certain. She is in primary school now. I’m not going to bring her here and then we find out we have to leave,” she says.

Life is still hard for Cristina, but better than back home, she believes.

She lives in a shared house with six people, each in a room of their own.

Living on the outskirts of London costs £600 a month in rent and she hardly ever goes out to socialise or see the sights in the capital as she works from 7am to 7pm six days a week.

“I see this as a time in my life I have to make sacrifices,” she says.

Moving back to Bucharest wouldn’t make economic sense. She would have to pay £400 a month in rent and would never earn enough money for her daughter and 72-year-old dad, who is on a pension of €200 (£180) a month.

“He couldn’t survive without my money,” she says.

Does Brexit make her feel unsettled? “It depends on whether I can work any more, but I’m not scared about it.”

She hasn’t heard of “settled status” immigration ID, which would be mandatory under current proposals for all EU citizens, bar the Irish, from summer 2021.

“Everyone is very confused. I think that’s because of the people in charge,” she suggests.

Cristina doesn’t read Romanian or British newspapers or media, where Brexit is headline news every day, because it makes her “anxious”.

When Tudose explains what settled status is she says she is willing to apply for it but predicts there is going to be a lot of fraud, people looking to borrow passports and national insurance numbers to get the new identity.

Ultimately she hopes to return home, but for now her daughter and father need her wages in London.

Sîrbu Tiberius, 46, a shop worker in Burnt Oak, London. Photograph: The Guardian

Sîrbu Tiberius, 46, shop worker

Sebi, as he is known, has just arrived in London to work in a Romanian butcher’s shop in Burnt Oak. He stands at the counter, while his boss is telling the East European Resource Centre about hate crime that morning when two women shouted at them “to go home” in the lane beside his shop.

I used to earn £8 a day Sîrbu Tiberius

Sebi, like Cristina, came to Britain to give his child, a 13-year-old-boy, a better life.

“I want to secure a future for him, to send him to university.”

He is from Botoșani, the poorest part of Romania, and the lack of work prompted him to leave years ago.

He has worked on markets selling vegetables all his life, but in Romania he was earning just £8 a day “and that would be on a good day”, Sebi says.

He adds: “I lived in a village outside the town with my son and parents and would have to pay for the bus out of that as well as buy utilities, food and clothes.”

In London he hopes to earn around £1,200 a month, of which £300 is committed to a single room in a house share, gas and electricity on top of that would still leave him with enough to repatriate, if he does not spend money on going out.

He is now on a trial work period at the shop but is full of hope for what he can earn his family. “I am willing to work hard. I want to stay 20 years here until my retirement.”

Like Cristina, he tends to stay in the area and has seen none of the treasures of London’s museums and galleries, restaurants and shops, or the capital’s nightlife.

“I am afraid to spend money right now,” he says.

He hadn’t heard of Brexit and it was a friend who hooked him up with the Burnt Oak job.

If he wasn’t in London, he would be somewhere else in Europe earning for his parents and son. He spent a year in Turkey and two years working in a market in Poland.

Cristina at her Romanian restaurant Hoinar. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Cristina, 43, restaurant owner

Brexit has changed everything for east Europeans, says Cristina.

“When I came to the country, everybody spoke normally to you. There was no big difference if you had papers or not. People just treated you as people and liked immigrants. We worked hard and cleaned properly. British people didn’t know how to clean.

“Now, 18 years on and we have all the rights to work, people treat you like an animal,” she says.

People treat you like an animal here Cristina

But she says British people have never tried to understand Romania.

“Somebody asked me a few years ago: ‘Did we have TV in Romania?’ I asked them do they own two properties. If Romania is so bad why does Prince Charles love it so much?” she says, quickly doing a Google search on her phone to show his health retreat in the bucolic Transylvania.

Cristina says she has not been subjected to racial abuse, but her friends have, particularly those living outside London. “The day after the referendum, they said people said they didn’t want to serve us.”

She thinks that many Romanians have returned home because London is now so expensive to rent and because of the uncertainty of Brexit.

Christina says: “Now everyone is so scared. People from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, because they do not know what is going to happen.

“I tell people it will be okay and they say: ‘No, you need permanent residency, you could be stopped, you could be deported.’”

She managed chambermaids for three years in the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch, London, and then in a rubber factory in Doncaster where she was paid £10 an hour.

Christina, who is from the city of Târgoviște, came into the country with a sports team in 2001 on a 15-day tourist visa and went on to spend most of her life in the UK in cleaning jobs, working in hotels as well as jobs in coffee chains.

“The standard of cleaning by British workers was so bad,” she says in reference to one hotel in Stansted where she worked. “The floor manager was English and she didn’t care about the standard of cleaning.” Romanians care and make people come back to clean properly if rooms are not done right.”

Like many Romanians interviewed by the Guardian, Cristina left her child behind to come to Britain to make a better life for her son. She was here for two-and-a-half years before he could join her.

“It was so hard to leave him. I didn’t want to do it. I had days when I just did my job and I would cry all day,” she says.

But she was determined she wanted her son to have something better and after a stint in London went to Barcelona, Spain, and then they went back to Romania in 2009 and opened some food shops.

A year later they returned to London to run a restaurant in Dollis Hill with her husband and her two children.

She has not heard of the settled status scheme that the Home Office was about to launch, but says London is where she intends to stay while her younger child remains in school.

“I don’t have an option. We are going to Romania on holiday, my son says: ‘Mum, when are we going to go home?’”

Ovidiu Șarpe and his son Gabriel. He runs a bakery, Patisserie Romana, and a number of bars. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Ovidiu Șarpe, 72, bakery owner

Ovidiu is said to be one of the best known Romanians in the community in Britain, having lived in the country for nearly 40 years. He risked his life to escape the terrors of Romania’s communist dictatorship in 1979.

He speaks seven languages, has a thriving bakery business in north London and was once a partner in a chain of pizzerias.

But his arrival on a boat from eastern Europe was pure fluke.

The English aren’t going to take those jobs. They won’t do the shit jobs Ovidiu Șarpe

His wife had died in an accident leaving him with five small children, the youngest just six months old, to bring up on his own. After six years as a widow, and with the Ceaușescu regime in its first flushes of dictatorship, he decided his best chance was to leave the country be secreting himself on a ship heading to Freiberg in Germany, where he had some friends.

“The truth is 1979-1980 were really hard,” he says.

While on board, the ship was rechartered and he ended up in Turkey and then – by chance – in Kent, having lost half his body weight as a stowaway.

“It was a huge risk. We had political prisons. You could have been sentenced to 15 years in a labour camp or disappeared.”

He went straight to Amnesty and after three weeks he got a job in the Basel St Hotel behind Harrods in London, giving him a start in the hospitality trade that was to last decades.

As for Brexit, he says: “I don’t know if the government is prepared. Romanians work everywhere, in hospitals, coffee shops, garbage, they work in Asda, Iceland, some are in good positions, working in management, in homes for the elderly. The English aren’t going to take those jobs. They won’t do the shit jobs.”

“I think Brexit is done to get rid of all the people on benefits,” he adds, and goes on to complains about fellow Romanians who come to the UK to take advantage – as he sees it – of the British system. “I have five children and am a single parent but I did not take any benefit for all that time. People can be entitled to benefits but the English government doesn’t check.”

He says: “There is trash in every country. But they are blaming 98% of Romanians for what the 2% do. You feel embarrassed sometimes to say you’re Romanian.”

Cătălin Constandiș works at Haygrove – a berry, cherry and organic grower, with farms in the UK, South Africa and Portugal. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/The Guardian

Cătălin Constandiș, 36, farm manager

Theology postgraduate Cătălin has been in the UK on and off since 2006, initially on a seasonal agriculture workers’ scheme which allowed temporary immigration from Bulgaria and Romania ahead of full accession to the EU.

He and his wife are now British citizens and will be here at least until they retire.

Cătălin believes the UK seasonal work is less attractive, largely because the pound is so weak. In 2006 the pound would buy €1.46. Now it will buy just €1.12 and the price of accommodation and food has gone up.

Here I could build a career on my own steam Cătălin Constandiș

But the big appeal for Cătălin was a career. He progressed from picker, to supervisor, to team leader to line manager and is now a farm manager, running a £7m turnover section of the berry fields where he manages a team of 260 people.

He is from a middle-class family who could afford to send their son to university, but Cătălin says such a career trajectory would not have existed at home. “Here I could build a career on my own steam. In Romania you need to know someone to help you. You would never have become a farm manager in 12 years,” he says.

From the beginning the money was relatively attractive with wages of £350-£380 a week on the fruit farm in Herefordshire compared with the £200 a month on offer in Romania.

“With the money I was able to buy land in Romania, plant cherry trees, renovate my father’s house, buy new furniture and put in central heating,” he says.

“When I think of Britain then, the prices of food and fuel were lower, you could buy a lot more and save a lot more. There was never any racism towards us.”

Cătălin thought he would eventually go home but a growing family and a good career made him rethink his plans, and he became a British citizen – an expensive insurance policy he took out against Brexit.

He paid £1,273 for each application, plus £150 each for the English test and £50 each for the life in the UK test. Not a trifling figure. “I was quite stressed about it, I took it very seriously,” he says. “It was a lot of money. I paid taxes for 12 years and just to secure my future I had to pay that.”

He works hard but he likes his life in a quiet village in the West Country. “It’s clean, there are plenty of green areas and parks and we have friends in towns around here.”

Many Romanians are returning: Cătălin has a friend who runs a haulage company which cannot hire drivers and the economy back home is getting stronger. But he thinks Romanians will continue to migrate throughout Europe for years to come.