Evidence of the impact of Brexit on Racialised European Diaspora

Brexit has fundamentally changed the lives of EU citizens who have made the UK their home for decades. However, the UK’s exit did not affect all Europeans in the diaspora equally.

Five years after Brexit, increasing evidence indicates that racialised EU citizens continue to face disproportionate barriers in securing and exercising their rights in the UK and in the EU. For British citizens from ethnic minority backgrounds residing in the 27 EU countries, structural, institutional and everyday racism is business as usual (Beson & Lewis, 2019). In the UK, the introduction of the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), intended to protect residency rights, has exposed persistent equality blind spots that continue to place around 800000 minority European citizens at heightened risk of exclusion, loss of rights, and long-term insecurity (Parker et al., 2025). The Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA) report that over a third (35%) of EU and EEA EFTA citizens in the UK feel “discriminated against” by public bodies since Brexit, with half of those experiencing discrimination coming from ethnic minority backgrounds (IMA, 2025).

Recent studies commissioned by the EU Delegation have reinforced these concerns, prompting leading scholars to warn of a risk of “a repeat of the Windrush scandal” (Parker et al., 2026).

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