May talks exit plans at summit

BRUSSELS — British Prime Minister Theresa May promised Thursday that EU citizens will not be immediately kicked out of Britain when it leaves the union, and says their fate will be a top priority in British exit negotiations — prompting praise from other EU leaders.

May’s proposals at an EU summit were a carefully timed gesture days after talks began on the United Kingdom’s departure. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called them “a good start.”

May laid out benchmarks for the rights of 3 million EU citizens living legally in the U.K. and how they should be shielded from excessive harm because of the divorce. She made it clear that the U.K. wants reciprocal measures for the 1.5 million British citizens living in the EU. The issue of citizens’ rights is especially sensitive in the exit talks.

Under May’s proposal, EU citizens with legal residence in the U.K. will not be asked to leave and will be offered a chance to regularize their situation after Britain’s exit, a senior British official said. May also promised to cut the burdensome bureaucracy such paperwork can involve, the official said.

“No one will face a cliff edge,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, since May made the proposal at a closed EU summit dinner.

Merkel welcomed May’s promises but insisted that “there are, of course, many, many other issues.” She mentioned the bill that the U.K. will have to pay to leave and questions about how to deal with the border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.

“It means we have lots left to do,” Merkel said.

Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern said May’s proposals are “a first step” but warned there are still many European citizens in Britain who would not be covered by the proposals. “We are now at the start of all this and we don’t know whether it will be a sprint or a marathon,” he said.

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, said there are “thousands of questions to ask” about May’s proposals and questioned why the British leader was laying them out with EU leaders instead of with the British exit negotiators.

The U. K.’s departure in 2019 will cause the EU to lose one of its biggest members and a global player, but the other EU nations are already looking at some of the spoils of the divorce. They will decide in November where the EU agencies currently based in Britain will move to on the continent, EU chief Donald Tusk announced.

The bloc’s medicines and banking agencies are now in London, and almost every EU nation wants one of the two agencies. On Thursday, the EU leaders agreed on procedures for a fair pick.

Discord over whether the U.K.’s exit process could still be reversed surfaced at the summit.

Tusk said when British friends asked him if he could imagine a way for Britain to remain part of the bloc, he told them: “The EU was built on dreams that seemed impossible to achieve. So who knows?”

“You may say I am a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” Tusk added, quoting a lyric from the late John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, however, said the will of the British people who voted in a June 2016 referendum to leave the EU had to be respected.