Three European families explain why Brexit forced them to leave Kent behind

Ten years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, three women who had built lives in Kent sat down to explain why they felt they had no choice but to leave. Anna Sroka, Claudia Galeazzo, and Santa Upeniece had arrived in England at different times and for different reasons—a Polish teacher seeking adventure, an Italian pharmaceutical manager pursuing opportunity, a Latvian worker looking for stability. What they shared was a decade or more of roots: marriages, children, homes they had renovated, careers they had built from the ground up. And what they shared, too, was the experience of watching the country they had come to call home turn inward in ways that made them feel, for the first time, that they did not belong.

Anna arrived in England in 2004, just before Poland joined the European Union, with a group of friends and a simple goal: to improve her English. She was from Oświęcim, a small town in southern Poland, and London astonished her—the buses, the Underground, the sheer scale and pace of it all. She met Marek, married him, and when their first child was born, they moved to Sittingbourne, a town she came to love for its quietness and friendliness. She earned her teaching qualifications and became a teacher. They had three children: Janek, Emilia, and Mikołaj. For sixteen years, this was their life. Then came June 23, 2016, and the referendum result: 51.9 percent to leave, 48.1 percent to remain. The hostility that followed was not always direct. Anna rarely encountered it face-to-face, though she remembered a group of teenagers at a playground overhearing her speak Polish and asking why she didn't go back to her own country. What wore on her more was the relentless backdrop—the newspaper headlines about migrants, the political arguments about immigration, the stories of foreigners being told to go home. "When you're living in a country that isn't your own, you often carry the feeling that you're not really from there," she said. "Brexit only deepened that feeling." When Janek finished primary school and was due to start secondary, the family faced a choice: stay and navigate an uncertain future, or leave while they still could. They chose to leave. The move was hardest on Janek, who had known no other home. The education systems were different—more homework in Poland, a different pace and structure. He missed his friends. For Anna and Marek, it was a return home. For their children, it was exile. Today, Anna teaches English in Oświęcim while Marek works at the local chemical plant. She does not think they will return to England. "The charm England once had for us has faded," she said. "It's not what it used to be."

Claudia Galeazzo woke on June 24, 2016, knowing her life was about to change. She had moved to Britain in 1996 to work for the European Medicines Agency, which had its headquarters in London. She was 59 now, but she had spent more than twenty years building a life there—almost all of her adult life. Her boyfriend Alberto had taken a gamble on her, leaving Italy to stay with her. They married, had a son named Francesco, and settled in Gravesend. They bought a house and renovated it carefully, imagining they would grow old there. Francesco went to local schools, sat his GCSEs, and grew up thinking of Kent as home. As an employee of an EU agency, Claudia understood immediately what the referendum result meant. The EMA would have to leave London. After two years of negotiations, Amsterdam won the bidding war. In 2019, Claudia, Alberto, and Francesco packed up and moved to the Netherlands. Francesco had just finished his exams. Instead of starting A-levels in England, he enrolled at an international school and completed the International Baccalaureate. Only months after they arrived, the pandemic swept through Europe. Claudia contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized, seriously ill for a long time. "That was the worst time of our lives," she said. Alberto's employer, Unilever, was able to transfer him to the Netherlands, where he continued his work. They now live near The Hague. But Claudia has never felt about the Netherlands the way she felt about England. When she retires next year at sixty, she plans to move to Italy. The Netherlands, she said, never became as close to her heart.

Santa Upeniece grew up in Sabile, a small town in Latvia, where work was hard to find after school. In 2007, encouraged by her mother and friends, she moved to England. She was thirty-four now. She had found work in the food industry, operating production lines and preparing fruit salads and pouches for supermarket shelves. It was there she met Artur Sadowski, who had also arrived in 2007 and worked nights in logistics, managing the loading of lorries. They built a life together, had two daughters—Marta, eight, and Agata, five—and settled in Gillingham. They focused on work, paying bills, creating a stable home. Then came the referendum, and with it, uncertainty. Santa began to worry about statuses and permits. What she heard from friends, from newspapers and television, made England stop feeling like a pleasant place. Artur experienced hostility at work. After Theresa May triggered Article 50, a colleague asked him if he was packing to go home. "Maybe this was a joke," Santa said, "but it did not feel nice." The economic realities that followed proved decisive. Prices rose while wages stagnated. Even with two salaries, they could not see a secure future. Marta had started school after the Brexit vote and, according to her parents, encountered rejection from some children because she was not English. She became friends with just one girl, from Ukraine, who faced the same situation. Artur wanted his children to have the carefree childhood he had had, to grow up near their grandparents, to play in a big garden. He believed he had better prospects in Poland. The family moved to southern Poland, near Nowy Sącz, surrounded by mountains. Artur works as a production planner for a kitchen worktops company. Santa has paused her career to raise the girls and learn Polish. She already spoke Latvian, Russian, and English, but Poland brought fresh challenges. When asked how life there compared to England, she said simply: "Polish people accept me. In UK, I did not feel safe anymore."