People who have worked in the UK for years and are on track to be granted permanent residency have told The i Paper they fear proposed changes could see them separated from their families.

Julian Grant, 32, was born in Vermont, Canada, but has built his “whole life” in Scotland, where he moved shortly after his 18th birthday.

“It’s not just a whole career but a community. It’s been the entirety of my adult life,” said the freelance consultant in renewable energy.

After 10 years of continuous legal residence in the UK on student and graduate visas, Grant should be eligible for permanent settlement next year under current migration rules.

But his life has been a “misery” since the Government proposed changes to immigration policy, due to come into force this autumn, which include abolishing the 10-year long residence route.

“I belong here in every other sense,” Grant said. “The thought of leaving and starting over again somewhere else is so dismaying and unfair and painful to think about.”

Grant is on what is known as the long term residency route which allows people on visas which would not otherwise lead to settlement, such as student, graduate or spousal visas, to get indefinite leave to remain (ILR) in recognition of significant time spent in the UK.

He was in “shock” when he read that Labour’s crackdown on migration would apply to those already in the UK, including those on the long term residency route.

“I read the news and left work and just sat down outside, sort of reeling because this has been a plan I’ve been working and building towards for years now,” Grant said.

Grant arrived in 2012 to study a bachelor’s degree at St Andrews, leaving for a year and returning in 2017 for his PhD. He is a season ticket holder for his local team Hibernian FC and a trustee of Leith St. Andrew’s Trust, a charity working to bring a former church into community ownership in his neighbourhood.

He is now on a graduate visa which is due to expire in late 2027, when he will already be eligible to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

“Despite all the years of immigration stress and pain and fees, this 10 year route has always been offered as a way of settlement, a way of formalising that this is my home and where I want to be part of,” he said. “[If it goes] I’ll be back to square one and very likely have to leave the country.”

Family ‘devastated’ by visa reforms

Sami (not his real name), an IT and healthcare worker living in Gloucester, has already been separated from his wife and baby daughter after conditions for the skilled worker visa were changed in July 2025.

His job was reclassified from “skilled” to “medium skilled”, meaning he was not allowed to have dependents in the UK. The family had just spent £12,000 on visa fees, which was not refunded when Sami’s wife and daughter had to return to India in September 2025.

He hoped to be reunited with them when he becomes eligible for settlement next year, but the scrapping of the long term residency route would “devastate” his plans.

“It’s so unfair, my wife contributed so much to the UK. She was a lead Covid vaccine administrator,” he said.

Sami also wants to raise his daughter in the UK, but fears he will not be able to do so now. “When you dream and you hope, you see yourself and your children in a better society. I always thought she’d grow up here,” he said.

‘My future is completely uncertain’

Suveni Madan, 26, a therapist about to embark on her doctoral studies in Scotland after completing a bachelor’s and master’s degree, says she has planned her life for the last five years to work towards settlement.

“If I was aware that my only option for settlement was a skilled worker visa I would have planned my career differently,” she said. Therapy jobs are mostly freelance so it would be very difficult for her to get a work visa in this role.

“I’ve made a huge investment in my education, that was done with a strategy, an end goal,” Madan said. “Now my future looks completely uncertain, I will probably have to leave the country. It’s absolutely cruel to pick someone out of their life like that.”

‘We are the most integrated migrants’

The proposed changes to the long term residency scheme have not yet come into force or been confirmed by the Government, so some at risk of being affected are holding out hope they will be exempt from retrospective reforms.

After Housing Secretary Angela Rayner criticised plans for reforms to impact foreign workers already in the UK as “un-British”, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood indicated in a speech to the Labour Party conference that she might water down this aspect of the proposed reforms.

Ibrahim (not his real name), 26, a healthcare assistant living in London, thinks it would be a mistake for the Government to end the long term residency route as he believes migrants on this pathway are the best examples of successful immigration.

“I would say we are probably the most integrated people because you hardly find people who’ve been here for 10 years that… are floating around in the immigrant bubble. We’ve been to university here, we’ve been here almost a decade” he said.

Ibrahim came to the UK in 2017 from Nigeria aged 17, and now works in a GP surgery as a clinical administrator.

He previously worked in a Covid-19 test lab and developed a “sense of belonging” through working with patients.

“I think it would be a real shame to say that people who are a few months away from qualifying, that they will… no longer see that proceed because of some new policies,” he said.

‘We abided by the rules, now we’re being punished’

Dana, 39, (who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions in her home country), has suffered from panic attacks and anxiety because of the uncertainty.

“Because I come from [the Middle East], I’ve always been restricted within the cultural and social norms, until I came over here,” she said.

She has put off getting married to her partner of six years because doing so would mean giving up citizenship of her home country, which prohibits her from marrying a non-Muslim man.

“We abided by all the rules. So why do we get punished now?,” she said of proposals to make the reforms retrospective.

A spokesperson from the Long Residence Advocacy Group, representing over 550 people on the 10-year long residence route to settlement in the UK, said: “These are just some of examples of many, many people who have already contributed so much. If the earned settlement proposals go ahead as they are, all of the time that we’ve spent here could be reset to zero. It is absolutely unfair.”

They group is asking for transitional arrangements for people who have lived in the UK for at least six years to settle under existing routes.

A Home Office spokesperson said:  “Last November, we set out reforms that mean settlement must be earned and not automatic. A consultation on elements of those reforms has now closed, and we will set out our response in due course.”