NICOLA Sturgeon will today launch a campaign to encourage EU nationals to continue living in Scotland as the UK prepares for Brexit.
The First Minister is expected to unveil details of the drive to the media in a business which employs a large number of workers from the European mainland.
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Michael Russell, the Scottish Brexit Secretary, drew attention to the campaign earlier this week when he gave evidence to MSPs
“We believe there is a sufficient risk, and evidence of a sufficient risk, for us to take some exceptional steps to try to encourage people to stay,” he told members of Holyrood’s Constitution Committee on Wednesday.
“What we are doing is mounting a campaign, which will be live shortly, to encourage EU citizens to stay and to make it clear that they are valued and wanted.”
Figures from the Scottish Government published in 2017, showed there were around 128,000 EU nationals working north of the Border contributing around £4.42 billion a year to the economy.
Data released in August last year by the Office for National Statistics revealed EU workers were leaving the UK at the fastest rate since the ONS started tracking such data.
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The numbers leaving were especially high for people from Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
EU citizens were not allowed to vote in the 2016 referendum and now face concerns they may be stripped of their rights. A Commons cross-party parliamentary report warned they would lose their right to freedom of movement, housing and social security under new laws to regulate immigration after Brexit.
It voiced fears that the UK Government’s EU citizen registration scheme does not provide physical proof of status, meaning they could suffer the same fate as the Windrush generation after Brexit.
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