A LEADING member of Wrexham’s Portuguese community has said many of her fellow countrymen are planing to move back to their homeland as the Home Office begins its ‘settled status’ scheme in the UK ahead of Brexit.

EU nationals and their family members who wish to remain in the country beyond June 2021 must apply to the settlement scheme, which entered its first public testing phase yesterday.

The application process is online and via an app where applicants will be asked to prove their identity, their residence in the UK and will be asked whether they have criminal convictions in any overseas country.

There are 3.5 million EU citizens currently living in the UK and most will have to apply via the scheme if they want to continue living in the country after June 2021.

Critics are warning that thousands could be left without legal status if applications are not processed quickly and efficiently and, according to Iolanda Banu Viegas, the stress of what the future holds is causing many of Wrexham’s estimated 2,000 Portuguese to consider their future in North East Wales.

“Everyday something new happens and everything that happens is making things more complicated than they were before,” said Ms Viegas, 44, who is originally from Mozambique and now lives in Caia Park.

“Since the referendum everything has been quite challenging and different but we are still working hard and living our lives waiting to find out what is going to happen.

“Nothing has improved in the last two years because we still don’t know what is going on. Are we leaving with a deal or no deal?

“All we know is that March is just around the corner and we still don’t know what we are supposed to do.”

Ms Viegas, a representative on the Race Council Cymru and director of the Portuguese Speaking Community Group in Wrexham, said the uncertainty about what Brexit would mean for the town’s Portuguese community was continuing to make life difficult for her fellow ex-pats.

“As far as I’m aware there are lots who are already leaving the country,” she said.

“Others are waiting to hear what is going to happen before deciding if they will go or not.

“Our country is waiting for us and we’ve been told we can come back at any time but for people like myself, we left everything behind and settled here.

“This is our home and we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes said extensive testing of the new system “shows clearly that we are well on track to deliver a system that will make it easy and straightforward for EU citizens to obtain status”.

But pressure group the3million surveyed its EU members to find their biggest concern was losing their rights in the future, with founder Maike Bohn warning trust in ministers is low.

“The Windrush people trusted the Home Office and many of them got deported because they were citizens but couldn’t prove it,” she said.

Officials expect they can process about 6,000 applications a day, with about 1,500 caseworkers on the scheme and a further 400 in a resolution centre to deal with issues.

Ms Viegas said: “It is very unfair. It is our home too and we pay our taxes and contribute so much to society in every area, from education to health.

“Even if it is just factory work everybody needs to put food on the table and that is what we have been doing but we are now advising the whole community to get all their identification cards updated and to look for old papers that prove that they have lived here for for more than five years.

“We never had any problems in the community and then after the referendum, which nobody at the time understood it was all about, we found out that according to a majority of people we weren’t welcome.

“All of us have made great friends here in Wrexham and that’s where we’ve grown to become who we are today.

“It wasn’t easy to settle but once we did we were very happy to be part of this community and we integrated