Much has been written about the possible brain drain among European nationals following the Brexit vote. A huge 76% of European academics are thinking about leaving the UK. But they aren’t the only ones who feel unwelcome here. I’m a British academic, and I’m leaving to take up a post in Europe.

Thanks to now-mainstream racist and anti-immigration discourses and policies, I no longer feel at home here. For me, Brexit is the last straw, building on foundations laid by the government’s net migration policy (upheld by the supreme court last week). Introduced in 2012 to reduce immigration to “sustainable levels” by limiting family reunification, it has directly undermined my right to family life.

My personal experience of the policy began when I married a non-EU citizen in 2011 while conducting doctoral fieldwork in his home country. Although we’ve now been married six years, my husband has never been able to enter the UK. Our first application for a tourist visa, so that he could meet my family over Christmas in 2012, was rejected on the grounds that I did not have sufficient savings.

I couldn’t apply for a two-year “leave to enter” visa for him either, because despite juggling part-time teaching and consultancy contracts, I didn’t earn over the £18,600 net income threshold that permits British nationals to invite a non-EU spouse. This threshold is designed to bar entry to individuals who would end up claiming benefits, but ignores other types of assets. In my case, I lived rent-free with my parents so my husband and I would never have had to seek recourse to public funds.

It is estimated that the threshold affects just over 40% of the British working population and discriminates against women in particular. As many as 17,800 families can be broken up each year, and in many cases the policy has actually created de facto single parents reliant on the welfare state.

I now have a full-time job at a university I adore, where I did two Master’s degrees and my PhD. The combination of departments and research centres at my institution makes it the perfect place for me to work. I take great pleasure in my job, which involves supporting less privileged students to enter higher education. And I have been lucky in that my supervisers and colleagues have been unwaveringly supportive, both professionally and emotionally.

I always assumed that I would settle with my husband in the UK, given my strong networks in British academia and the fact that my biological family all live here. But the most my husband and I see each other in person is for one to two weeks up to three times a year, and we maintain our relationship through Skype. Although we would love to start a family, we’ve postponed having children for several years as I couldn’t face the insecurity of giving birth to and raising a baby without him.

I now earn enough to bring my husband to the UK, but applications for “leave to enter” and especially “permanent settlement” are extremely onerous and expensive (£1,500 for the former and £6,000 for the latter). This is compounded by the fact that English is not the official language in his home country, so for permanent settlement he must pass exams requiring a standard of English well beyond that needed for everyday life in the UK. Because he also presents dyslexia symptoms, we would face the cost of years of private language lessons if we are to live together.

Like many other couples, the hurdles, uncertainty, and ongoing distance between us have negatively affected us both financially and emotionally. Until I recently secured a contract at a European university, we were in a constant state of anxiety as to whether we would ever find a solution to our situation.

Incredibly, I have more rights in Europe than I do in Britain as a British citizen. European countries realise the value of highly-skilled employees in making their universities competitive. For instance, Germany’s Humboldt Research Fellowship [pdf] provides a stipend for dependent family members, and funds language acquisition for non-German researchers and their spouses.

I have invested heavily in my academic career, and Britain has invested in me: I benefited from several degrees at previously subsidised rates of £3,500 a year, not to mention a prestigious Research Council PhD grant. But I don’t feel a sense of duty to “give back” to a country that denies me the right to family life.

Debates about the risks that the net migration policy and hard Brexit pose to academia have tended to focus on restrictions on international students [pdf], and the challenges UK universities will face in retaining and recruiting the best academics and securing collaborative research grants. Yet the potential loss of British academics affected by absurd family reunification rules, or those with EU spouses uncertain after Brexit, has remained largely invisible.

But after following the comments on various academic blogs, I sense that I am not the only one looking for an escape route. Theresa May’s model of Global Britain is anything but, and risks alienating those with personal and professional links to the world beyond this small island. Evidence shows that highly skilled Brits are currently emigrating en masse as salaries and quality of life are so much better elsewhere – and there is no reason to assume that this won’t apply to British academics after Brexit.

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