Britain's Europeans gripped by fear, confusion, heartache

LONDON (AP) — A tsunami of uncertainty has engulfed Anna Woydyla, a Polish restaurant worker in London, since Britain voted to leave the European Union.

Would her two teenage children, who grew up in the United Kingdom, still qualify for loans to study at British universities?

The 41-year-old is among hundreds of thousands of European Union workers in Britain who are fearful and confused over what happens next as their adoptive country begins the long process of unwinding its many ties to continental Europe.

The immigrants changed the face of Britain, turning London's Kensington neighborhood into a suburb of Paris, changing sleepy English towns like Boston into Baltic enclaves, filling supermarket shelves across the nation with Polish lager and Wiejska sausage.

At workplaces and schools across the country, managers have sent out emails to worried foreign staffers and students, assuring them that — for now — nothing has changed.

A survey commissioned by the Financial Times found that if Britain's current immigration rules were applied to EU nationals, the overwhelming majority would lose their jobs and be forced to leave the country — catastrophic news for Spanish barristas, Romanian strawberry pickers, German investment bankers and the industries that rely on them.

An estimated 850,000 people have left Poland for the U.K. to seek wages and opportunities far beyond what they could ever expect in their ex-communist homeland, a flow so dramatic that Polish is now England's second-most-spoken language.

The fate of the Poles in Britain is such an important domestic issue in Poland that President Andrzej Duda vowed after the British referendum that Polish leaders will "do everything to keep the rights unchanged" in upcoming negotiations with British leaders.

In practice, however, few EU citizens have bothered as their passports already allow them to travel freely and easily access education, health care, pensions and other services in Britain.

Aware of the EU workers' anxiety, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who had backed the failed "remain" side, issued a special message Friday to the nearly one million European citizens living in London alone.