With 20 months until #Brexit, UK orders year-long EU #migration study

EU citizens' freedom to live and work in Britain will end as soon as it leaves the bloc, scheduled for March 2019, but ministers have said they will design a system that allows businesses to hire the workers they need.

However, with Brexit negotiations already under way and the EU hoping to wrap up talks by October 2018, critics said the study should have been commissioned sooner and that uncertainty was already driving EU nationals out of the UK labor market.

Interior Minister Amber Rudd asked the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), a public body that advises the government, to look at how migration affects the labor market and the wider economy, and how the post-Brexit rules need to work to support the country's plans for an industrial revival.

Concern about the long-term social and economic impact of immigration helped drive last year's vote to leave the EU, and the government has a long-standing aim to bring net migration into Britain below 100,000. In 2016, net migration was 248,000.

"The public must have confidence in our ability to control immigration — in terms of type and volume — from within the EU," Rudd wrote in an article for the Financial Times.

"That is why, once we have left the EU, this government will apply its own immigration rules and requirements that will meet the needs of UK businesses, but also of wider society."

UK commissions EU migration impact study, promises no Brexit cliff-edge