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Rights are always conditional in practice. The "right" to live in the EU comes with strings attached too: 1. You can only stay for three months. After that, at

Rights are always conditional in practice. The "right" to live in the EU comes with strings attached too: 1. You can only stay for three months. After that, at least in some states, you have to prove you can financially support yourself and family if you want to stay, i.e. you need to find a job pretty fast. 2. You can be refused if you have committed a crime. For instance this is true of Germany. It's easy to fail these requirements. However you can't lose the right to live where you're born. The reason not many people cared is that this requirement isn't much different to normal visa rules for most Brits. If you don't have a job and you move somewhere, you need to find someone to hire you fairly fast which means but you wouldn't have time to become fluent in the language unless for some reason you already were (not true of nearly all Brits). You can do it if you have specialized skills that compensate for non-fluency. But if you have specialized skills you can probably convince a company to hire you ahead of time, and that usually unlocks a visa anyway. There are edge cases where this right is useful, but there aren't that many, which is why it didn't come up much ten years ago and why so many Brits move to non-EU countries.

ben_w 1y ago
> However you can't lose the right to live where you're born. Yes you can. And many have. > The reason not many people cared is that this requirement isn't much different to normal visa rules for most Brits. If you don't have a job and you move somewhere, you need to find someone to hire you fairly fast which means but you wouldn't have time to become fluent in the language unless for some reason you already were (not true of nearly all Brits). You can do it if you have specialized skills that compensate for non-fluency. But if you have specialized skills you can probably convince a company to hire you ahead of time, and that usually unlocks a visa anyway. 1. I literally listed examples with no income in that list. 2. You'd be amazed how much English is spoken in Berlin. Even political slogans, so you'll get the point of e.g. this even if you don't translate it/understand German: https://made-in-germany-2030.de https://made-in-germany-2030.de This is even a point of contention, for obvious reasons. 3. That it's a small number who cared (though 48% voting for anything it isn't what I'd call a "small"), doesn't mean you're using "right" correctly. If Texas seceded from the US, their citizens would (probably) lose the rights of US citizenship; if Ticino seceded from Switzerland, the rights of Swiss citizenship; if Scotland from the UK, UK citizenship. The British stopped being citizens of an EU nation, and consequently lost the rights that are afforded by treaty and which are broadly described as "rights of EU citizenship". That you can get those rights back by going through a process of changing citizenship is what it means to have lost them in the first place.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  How do you lose citizenship of the place you're born without explicitly giving it up? If you can support yourself off savings you don't need an income, which is why retirees can go to Spain. But you do need to be able to support yourself financially and without much time to do so. I wouldn't be that amazed, given I've been to Berlin many times. Sure, you can go to big cities and then compete with locals for unskilled work without speaking the local language. You might be able to find temporary jobs where it's not strictly required. Most people don't want to do that. > though 48% voting for anything it isn't what I'd call a "small" But we're talking about moving abroad here. Of that 48%, 15% were primarily motivated by the false claims made about economic armageddon. https://dominiccummings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/screenshot-2016-11-27-13-58-441.png?w=498&h=458 https://dominiccummings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/scree... Only about 30% of the population actually supported the EU for any reason (we don't know which ones). If you could go back in time and tell people 10 years ago that leaving would have no impact on GDP, no impact on trade, and no impact on jobs, the vote would have gone to Leave by maybe 65-70% (rough guess, can't be bothered to recompute the numbers with the 9% of don't knows excluded). > If Texas seceded from the US, their citizens would (probably) lose the rights of US citizenship This is ultimately a not very interesting debate about the precise semantics of the word "right". In the past I've attended a lecture by a human rights lawyer who argued there might be actually no such thing as rights, because if you try and nail down the term to legal precision it always ends in a mess. But OK - what rights would Texans lose? Citizenship is a status, not a right. The rights afforded by the Bill of Rights? Probably not unless secession involved rewriting the constitution from scratch. The right to move to California and live there? Unless it was a very nasty split they'd presumably retain the ability to apply for an H1B or green card, like anyone else. Moving to the EU was never a right in the sense citizenship rights are, because the "right" to move to other EU countries was always contingent on massive monetary payments, and something you have to purchase isn't normally described as a right. A better analogy than Texas seceding is if someone walked into a shop and declared "I have the right to own this expensive watch". It would just confuse people to talk like that and they'd disagree with you, because you'd have to pay for it first. If you bought it and then said, "Now I have the right to this watch" you'd again be talking very unidiomatic English (at best). That's just one reason the EU isn't a nation and never has been, despite how some people dream of one. A nation doesn't charge you a subscription fee to be a citizen of it. The EU does. It's why EU federalists talk about empires and colonies when they think nobody is listening.

ben_w 1y ago

> However you can't lose the right to live where you're born. Yes you can. And many have. > The reason not many people cared is that this requirement isn't much different to normal visa rules for most Brits. If you don't have a job and you move somewhere, you need to find someone to hire you fairly fast which means but you wouldn't have time to become fluent in the language unless for some reason you already were (not true of nearly all Brits). You can do it if you have specialized skills that compensate for non-fluency. But if you have specialized skills you can probably convince a company to hire you ahead of time, and that usually unlocks a visa anyway. 1. I literally listed examples with no income in that list. 2. You'd be amazed how much English is spoken in Berlin. Even political slogans, so you'll get the point of e.g. this even if you don't translate it/understand German: https://made-in-germany-2030.de https://made-in-germany-2030.de This is even a point of contention, for obvious reasons. 3. That it's a small number who cared (though 48% voting for anything it isn't what I'd call a "small"), doesn't mean you're using "right" correctly. If Texas seceded from the US, their citizens would (probably) lose the rights of US citizenship; if Ticino seceded from Switzerland, the rights of Swiss citizenship; if Scotland from the UK, UK citizenship. The British stopped being citizens of an EU nation, and consequently lost the rights that are afforded by treaty and which are broadly described as "rights of EU citizenship". That you can get those rights back by going through a process of changing citizenship is what it means to have lost them in the first place.

mike_hearn 1y ago
How do you lose citizenship of the place you're born without explicitly giving it up? If you can support yourself off savings you don't need an income, which is why retirees can go to Spain. But you do need to be able to support yourself financially and without much time to do so. I wouldn't be that amazed, given I've been to Berlin many times. Sure, you can go to big cities and then compete with locals for unskilled work without speaking the local language. You might be able to find temporary jobs where it's not strictly required. Most people don't want to do that. > though 48% voting for anything it isn't what I'd call a "small" But we're talking about moving abroad here. Of that 48%, 15% were primarily motivated by the false claims made about economic armageddon. https://dominiccummings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/screenshot-2016-11-27-13-58-441.png?w=498&h=458 https://dominiccummings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/scree... Only about 30% of the population actually supported the EU for any reason (we don't know which ones). If you could go back in time and tell people 10 years ago that leaving would have no impact on GDP, no impact on trade, and no impact on jobs, the vote would have gone to Leave by maybe 65-70% (rough guess, can't be bothered to recompute the numbers with the 9% of don't knows excluded). > If Texas seceded from the US, their citizens would (probably) lose the rights of US citizenship This is ultimately a not very interesting debate about the precise semantics of the word "right". In the past I've attended a lecture by a human rights lawyer who argued there might be actually no such thing as rights, because if you try and nail down the term to legal precision it always ends in a mess. But OK - what rights would Texans lose? Citizenship is a status, not a right. The rights afforded by the Bill of Rights? Probably not unless secession involved rewriting the constitution from scratch. The right to move to California and live there? Unless it was a very nasty split they'd presumably retain the ability to apply for an H1B or green card, like anyone else. Moving to the EU was never a right in the sense citizenship rights are, because the "right" to move to other EU countries was always contingent on massive monetary payments, and something you have to purchase isn't normally described as a right. A better analogy than Texas seceding is if someone walked into a shop and declared "I have the right to own this expensive watch". It would just confuse people to talk like that and they'd disagree with you, because you'd have to pay for it first. If you bought it and then said, "Now I have the right to this watch" you'd again be talking very unidiomatic English (at best). That's just one reason the EU isn't a nation and never has been, despite how some people dream of one. A nation doesn't charge you a subscription fee to be a citizen of it. The EU does. It's why EU federalists talk about empires and colonies when they think nobody is listening.