‘The UK has changed. It has become hostile and closed’: EU citizens in Brussels react to Priti Patel’s new immigration scheme Exclusive: Sophie Weisz, a Frenchwoman working in Brussels, thinks she would sail through the new immigration rules, but now doesn’t want to

“I used to dream of living in London. It was so exciting, so free,” says ­Sophie Weisz, a Frenchwoman working in Brussels.

“But not any more. The country has changed: it has become hostile and closed. And this latest plan is just the icing on the cake.”

Ms Weisz, an IT consultant on a generous salary with perfect English, thinks she would sail through the new immigration rules.

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“Yes, I could move there under the plan – but now I don’t want to,” she says.

Curbing EU movement

Her scepticism is shared across Brussels, where most of the EU’s political offices are based. The new immigration plan is mainly aimed at curbing movement from the EU’s 27 countries.

Until the UK left the bloc, other Europeans could live, work, study and retire in the country – and the same rights were afforded to British citizens in the rest of the EU.

Rob McNeil, a researcher at University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) says net migration from the EU to the UK “has fallen off the cliff” and is now only a fifth of overall migration, around 50,000 – compared to around 200,000 in 2016, when it was about the same at non-EU migration. “This is partly due to the off-putting message from the Government about restricting migration,” he says. “It is reasonable to expect that this new policy will be even more off-putting to EU migrants.”

Meghan Benton, director of research at the Migration Policy Institute, questions whether the new policy will deliver the results it promises. The UK’s migration plans also get short shrift from the British who still live in the EU.

Dudley Curtis, a British national who works for a transport safety association in Brussels says that if Belgium had applied the UK’s new immigration rules to him 15 years ago, he would have not been able to move here.

The Australian model

The Australian points-based system is a way of prioritising applicants for migration based on characteristics such as age, education, language skills and work experience.

Candidates that score the highest number of points based on these characteristics are invited to submit a visa application.

Australia’s system is more centrally planned than employer-driven work-visa systems used by most countries as it is the government, rather than employers, that plays the key role in deciding who should be admitted and what criteria matters most. In Australia, people can migrate without a job offer, although other countries with points tests, such as Austria and New Zealand, either require or prioritise job offers.