In a threadbare youth centre in Bradford, Vie Clerc, who got off a Eurostar from Paris 19 years ago with £50 in her pocket and never left, laments the irony. “It’s the first one I’ll actually be able to vote in,” she said. “Shame I’ve never felt less British.”

In a bright mezzanine office in Bristol, Denny Pencheva, who landed in 2013 from Bulgaria via Copenhagen and now teaches at the university, bemoans politicians “who use us to score their political points, but don’t actually have to consider us – because politically, we don’t count”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Denny Pencheva, a teaching associate at Bristol University. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

In a Manchester advice bureau, 49-year-old Hossein Elias, a restaurant worker who came in 2013 on an Italian passport because his Bangladeshi parents settled in Vicenza in the early 90s, said it would solve nothing. “Britain was big once, but not now,” he said. “You need friends. Five sticks you cannot break; one stick, you can. Brexit’s stupid.”

And in a crowded pub in Hammersmith, Dariusz Kaczorowski, who has shifted a lot of stuff in a lot of London warehouses since pulling into Victoria on a coach from Poznan in 2009, couldn’t care less. “Pound’s down, people have changed,” he said. “I’m going home at Christmas, and this time I’m not coming back.”

Up and down this country, from Bradford to Bristol and Manchester to west London, EU nationals are eyeing an election that they could be forgiven for feeling is, at some level, all about them – and whose outcome will affect them as much as it will everyone else living in Britain, if not more.

Few will have any say in what happens on 12 December: two-thirds of EU nationals living in the UK may have applied for the settled status most will need to stay legally after Brexit, but in the past three years, barely 130,000 have applied for the citizenship that allows them to vote.

Many, after making Britain their lawful home, paying British taxes and raising British families, have been angered and offended by the anti-immigration rhetoric of pro-Brexit politicians - including Boris Johnson’s remark just this week that for too long EU nationals have been “able to treat the UK as though it’s part of their own country.”

And all are now intimately concerned by what happens next: by how, precisely, the decision of the British government to profoundly alter the status of as many as 4 million UK inhabitants will play out in their daily lives, once – as now seems increasingly likely – it is fully enacted.

For plenty, things don’t feel that great already, and Brexit hasn’t even happened yet. “This ‘not belonging’ stuff is quite hard to escape,” said 38-year-old Kuba Jablonowski, who came to the UK in 2006 “for the music, I guess, like everyone else” and now lectures in political geography at Exeter university.

The ordinary spaces of human interaction have become politicised, beyond belief Kuba Jablonowski

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kuba Jablonowski, a lecturer at Exeter University. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

“The other day I was in a DIY store here in Bristol, buying an extractor fan,” he said. “There was one really friendly young assistant, and an older one, looking at me a bit oddly. Four years ago, I would have thought: ‘She’s having a grumpy day.’ Now I’m thinking: ‘She wants me to go home.’”

That was not, Jablonowski stressed, any kind of judgment on the salesperson: “It’s just about how I feel. But the point is, there are millions of people who feel this way. The ordinary spaces of human interaction have become politicised, beyond belief. It’s quite scary, and it’s ripping the country apart.”

Clerc, who divides her time between raising awareness about settled status in West Yorkshire, helping people through the application process and caring for a Bradford man with quadriplegic cerebral palsy, feels the same – even after securing British citizenship last summer.

Everyone you meet now, you sort of calculate: leaver or remainer? Like, how will they react to me? Vie Clerc

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vie Clerc, a care and community worker and adviser for the3million Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“Everyone you meet now, you sort of calculate: leaver or remainer? Like, how will they react to me?” she said. Before the referendum she had “always felt really a part of this community. I’ve been through some very difficult feelings since then: anger, anxiety, resentment. I only survived by getting involved.”

In lives so suddenly and involuntarily politicised, the inability to vote is insult added to injury. Queuing for the romantic French comedy La Belle Époque, showing at the Ciné Lumière in South Kensington, 41-year-old Olivier Beauchêne, a marketing manager who has prospered in London since 2002, was angry.

“I understand rules are rules,” he said. “But it’s like the referendum. Decisions are being made that will directly impact our lives, and we are not consulted. Someone from the Commonwealth who’s been here a few weeks can vote; someone from the EU who’s been here decades can’t. Is that really normal?”

Malgorzata Piotrowska, 45, a translator and interpreter who moved to Bristol from Warsaw 14 years ago, said it was “very unfair. I got a letter from my MP explaining her Brexit position: nothing about us and our rights. Yet we’ve lived here so long, paid taxes, contributed, raised fine, English-speaking children whose future is here. We should have a say.”

Having a say looks all the more important in this election, many believe, because while it will not, as Boris Johnson insists, “get Brexit done” (or anything like it), it does feel like the end of Brexit’s first act and the beginning of EU citizens’ transition to a new, untested and, many fear, inferior status in the UK.

With the exception of Labour, which has pledged an automatic right to continue living and working in the UK without having to apply for it, the legal status and rights of EU citizens barely feature in the election manifestos. But campaigners say the issue will quickly become a problem if the Conservatives win a majority.

We’ve lived here so long, paid taxes, contributed, raised fine, English-speaking children whose future is here. Malgorzata Piotrowska

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Malgorzata Piotrowska, a translator and interpreter from Poland. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

Nicolas Hatton, a former marketing executive who blames his arrival in the UK 25 years ago on “a bit of an obsession with Siouxsie and the Banshees”, co-founded the Bristol-based lobby group the3million a few days after the referendum because “the prospect of this complete change to our status in law frankly scared the shit out of me”.

As things stand, Hatton notes, settled status is underpinned only by secondary legislation, meaning “the criteria and rights can all be changed. The Windrush scandal obviously crystallised our concerns: 20, 30, 40 years down the line, when all these politicians and their promises are gone, what will be left is the law.”

But if securing EU citizens’ rights “has to be our absolute key concern”, Hatton said, it is hardly a burning election issue: “The government have developed this narrative that everything’s fine, that we have a status that guarantees our rights. Except it really doesn’t. And no one is challenging that.”

The Windrush scandal obviously crystallised our concerns. Nicolas Hatton

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicolas Hatton from France, the co-founder and director of the3million Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

The new status makes discrimination against EU citizens “inevitable”, said Barbara Drozdowicz, who came to the UK 11 years ago and runs the East European Resource Centre in Hammersmith, west London, helping poor, vulnerable and exploited citizens mainly from the 2007 accession states.

“It’s not just the ‘what are you still doing here, when are you going home’ stuff,” Drozdowics said in her office. “That’s really become more prevalent since Brexit, more normalised, encouraged by some mainstream politicians. I’m talking about real discrimination in access to jobs, housing, services, benefits.”

The centre had already found employment agencies telling people – especially eastern Europeans – their holidays would be shorter, hours longer or pay lower because “‘You’re lucky to have a job’,” Drozdowics said. “How long before landlords start asking an extra £200 a month because you’ll ‘never find anywhere else’?”

Introducing a new legal status for several million people “opens up so many avenues for discrimination, intentional and unintentional”, she said. “Salaries can be frozen or cut, you can be turned down for new jobs, asked for a bigger flat deposit, denied benefits, particular kinds of healthcare, school places … It’s endless.”

People will suffer, Drozdowics said, and as always, it will be “the most vulnerable – the single mother, working a cleaning contract – who suffer most.” Like many, Drozdowics would dearly like to have seen promises of a strong unitary body to monitor “what actually happens to us after these elections. And a proper complaints procedure. Perhaps a pledge to invest in anti-discrimination and integration. This was the moment for party leaders to say they remember us.”

Instead, said 44-year-old Aurore Garric, a dental assistant, nursing a glass of white wine before the Ciné Lumière screening, “What actually have we seen? Michael Gove pretending we get free access to the NHS without paying in. Someone else saying people without settled status will be deported. It’s been awful. Terrible.”

In the eyes of many, it just reflects the unpleasant fact that for some pro-Brexit, mainly Conservative politicians, EU nationals are pawns in a wider political game. “It’s not hard,” said 62-year-old Wiard Sterk, a semi-retired Dutch creative consultant based in Wales who has lived and worked in Britain since 1982.

I’ve honestly never felt so excluded by Britain’s political class, and I came here in the early days of Margaret Thatcher. Wiard Sterk

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wiard Sterk, a creative consultant and advocate at the3million.

Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

“They used us to help them win their referendum. It worked. So they’re carrying on targeting us, because because they know it will win them support – and at no electoral cost. I’ve honestly never felt so excluded by Britain’s political class, and I came here in the early days of Margaret Thatcher. We’ve gone backwards.”

Pencheva, who teaches sociology, politics and international relations at Bristol University, was equally damning. “Politically, we’re insignificant because although there are lots of us, we don’t vote,” she said. “They don’t need to worry about how we might react to their rhetoric. And they exploit that, fully.”

For most Europeans, the campaign has been “profoundly toxic”, she said: “EU migration is a proxy for so many structural issues … It means we have to keep on justifying how much we contribute: how we pay taxes, hardly ever use the NHS, put in way more than we take out. Even pro-EU arguments are framed around the utility of immigration, when legally, we’re not even migrants. It’s all just so dehumanising. So damaging.”

As a former East German, I just want to shout it out loud, I want everyone to know: ‘Them and us’ never, ever works. Elke Dittrich

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elke Dittrich, an architect from the former East Germany.

Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

Jablonowski agreed. The election, he said, was “really about a single issue, which is a tragedy because so many other of the UK’s problems remain unresolved. But it means the campaign is really angry, confrontational, divisive. And of course it was planned that way, by the people who called it, so that they could win it.”

For some it is particularly painful. “The constant drip, drip of divisive propaganda – citizens of nowhere, queue jumpers – is just awful,” said Elke Dittrich, a 47-year-old Bristol architect who moved to the UK from Jena in former East Germany 21 years ago. “As a former East German, I just want to shout it out loud, I want everyone to know: ‘Them and us’ never, ever works. Never.”

For all, the image of British politics has taken a battering these past few months. In Manchester, 36-year-old Giulia Sirigu, who runs the north-west branch of the Italian Chamber of Commerce and lectures at Liverpool University, was frankly disbelieving. “I’m Italian, you know,” she said. “My country’s politics have always been chaotic. But now they actually feel more rigorous than yours.”

Her friend Maurizio Rodorigo, who advises Italian nationals for a trades union organisation, acknowledged he was part of a privileged group of EU citizens who were “interested, passionate even, about all this. Many, of course, are not. But honestly, the whole thing has been so dreadfully handled. It just feels like Britain is kind of closing down.”

So uncomfortable have the last three years been that Hatton, the campaigner, said it would almost be a relief when the election was finished and Brexit had finally begun. “We won’t be celebrating, but at least the uncertainty will be over,” he said.

The whole thing has been so dreadfully handled. It just feels like Britain is kind of closing down Maurizio Rodorigo

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maurizio Rodorigo, a co-ordinator at Inca in Manchester Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The next one, however, could be a different matter altogether. Net immigration from the EU may be at its lowest since 2003, with arrivals down by a third and departures – like Kaczorowski – more than double the level of five years ago, but those who stay are applying for British citizenship in ever greater numbers.

“Suppose, say, just a quarter of the EU citizens in the UK get British citizenship between now and 2024,” Hatton wondered over a cauliflower wrap in a busy Bristol deli staffed, almost entirely, by young Europeans.

“That’s a million voters, motivated to express their opinion. It’s far from improbable, and it could change an election outcome. Then we might really get somewhere. What matters to us, what politicians think they can say about us – all of it might start to matter, politically. Right now, I’m afraid, it doesn’t.”

Election night: what to watch for – video explainer