The promised land of milk and honey? From EU citizens to third-country nationals after Brexit

This chapter connects scholarly conversations to date (August 2019) on current and future EU and UK immigration rules and on EU citizenship as a status that entails a bundle of transnational rights. It concludes that in a case of no-deal Brexit, both UK nationals in EU-27 and EU citizens in the UK will face a future of complex European, national and international agreements, losing many EU citizenship rights they currently have. With the draft Withdrawal Agreement in limbo, it remains to be seen which rights - and to which extent - will be incorporated into the transitionary legal arrangements across the EU Member States and the UK, as well as how far they will feature in the negotiations and the final text of the future EU-UK partnership agreement. One thing is certain: the concept of EU citizenship, with normative aspirations of a self-standing legal status that seemed to offer much hope in the ‘golden age’ era of Grzelczyk, Baumbast, Martínez Sala, Rottman or Ruiz Zambrano, has been abandoned. It cannot be extended by the concept of acquired rights, continues to be tied to Member State nationality and woven into the strict black-letter-law wording of EU legislation.