EU citizens may face deportation threat after Brexit

THREE million European Union citizens in Britain might have to be deported in event of Brexit, a Home Office minister has suggested.

Campaigners for a vote to leave the EU denounced the comments by Lord Keen of Elie, the Advocate General for Scotland, as “absurd”.

Ministers were asked in the Lords “whether it is their intention that, in the event of the UK leaving the EU, citizens of EU member states who had previously settled in the UK would be entitled automatically to remain”.

Lord Keen replied: “UK citizens get the right to live and work in the other 27 member states from our membership of the EU.

“If the UK voted to leave the EU, the Government would do all it could to secure a positive outcome for the country, but there would be no requirement under EU law for these rights to be maintained.”

A Home Office spokesman confirmed: “The answer given is our position on this. It speaks for itself and we have nothing further to add.”

There are an estimated three million EU citizens in the UK. Peter Bone, a Conservative MP and co-founder of Brexit group Grassroots Out, said the Government’s comments were “part of Project Fear”.

He told the Politics-Home website: “Clearly any EU citizen that is legally here if we come out of the EU would absolutely have the right to remain here. Any other suggestion is just absurd.

Philip Davies, another Tory MP, said: “Nobody would ever suggest that anybody who has arrived here legally would be evicted from the country.”

Meanwhile, it has emerged that a UK visa for highly skilled overseas workers has been “dramatically” underused over the past few years, with just 12 per cent of those made available by the Government taken up since 2013, a study has found.

Under-use is particularly pronounced across the digital technology and engineering sectors.

There have been only 361 applications for a UK visa for exceptionally talented individuals over the past three years, despite 3,000 being made available by the Government, according to the law firm Collyer Bristow.