Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
Posted in 
Why are there no wetbacks in Europe?
April 11th, 2007 | 
Author: I recently came across Immigration Orange which covers immigration issues primarily in America but increasingly worldwide.When I thought about the things that they cover, it struck me that there don’t seem to be any Canadian wetbacks nor do there seem to be any in Europe. For those that don’t know “wetback” is the (derogratory) term used to describe illegal immigrants in America, essentially because the border is marked by the Rio Grande and therefore in times past they could be picked out by having wet-backs from crossing the river.
Legal immigrants to America fall broadly into one of four categories:
- Employment-based preference, essentially those who have skills that are in demand;
- Family preference, which allows people to sponsor close relatives;
- Diversity, which aims to increase the numbers of under-represented groups; and
- Refugees
There aren’t any Canadian wetbacks for the simple reason that it’s relatively easy for a Canadian to live and work in America quite legally therefore the number of Canadian illegal immigrants to America is much smaller than it would be otherwise. Aside from that, the Canadian economy is on a par with that in America so there are very few economic migrants whereas this is by far the largest category of immigrants from Mexico.
However, those reasons don’t apply in Europe. With the fall of the Eastern Bloc we have neither the fences nor the border guards so it’s clearly much easier for people to just walk over the borders than it has been in the past. Yet, still we appear to have neither the number of illegals nor the complex about them that exists in America. How come?
It seems to me that it’s largely down to the difference between the economic geography of America compared to Europe.
America borders with two countries. Canada is relatively rich and there seem to be no worries about illegal immigration from Canada. Mexico is relatively poor and the Americans are talking about building a wall to keep out the flood of illegal immigrants.
Europe on the other hand has a group of relatively rich countries in the centre, slightly poorer ones surrounding it and poorer still a little further out. Therefore, by and large, there isn’t the massive jump in relative economic prosperity when you move from one country to its immediate neighbours as there exists between Mexico and America. Move from Romania to Bulgaria and there is little difference. Move from Romania to France and there’s a big difference but then there are several countries between Romania and France whereas Romania and Bulgaria share a border.
Of course there are illegal immigrants in Europe but their numbers are a good deal smaller than they would be were there the sharp difference in prosperity in neighbouring countries as exists between Mexico and America.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
Ice Cream Vans as an indication of attitudes about the climate
Although Northern Ireland is definitely cooler than the south of France, one surprising difference is that Northern Ireland has icecream vans at just about every possible location that you’d find crowds of people whereas France seems to have none of these.That’s indicative of quite a different attitude towards the climate in general between NI and France which we’ve seen illustrated numerous times whilst we’ve been here.
As soon as the temperature drops below around 30c over here, all the locals don their Winter coats. Not just any old Winter coat either for the coats on sale in the local shops seem more suited to Arctic conditions than the, usually, very mild Winters that we get here. Although it’s been warm enough for us to be running around in t-shirts almost all the time since March 2006 (yes, all year), the local population has been wearing their heavy coats since late September.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference that we’ve seen though is when our son was born here at the end of August. As you can imagine, it was pretty hot then (high 30s) and the maternity ward was even warmer than that. Now, I know that the rule is to wrap up babies after they’re born but with those kind of temperatures, we just put a nappy on him and nothing else. Yet, every time the nurses came into the room they insisted in wrapping him in three layers of clothing. Net effect? Well, if we’d stayed any longer he’d have been dehydrated as the sweat was just pouring out of him with all that clothing and he clearly wasn’t comfortable.
He’s still considerably behind in his vaccinations too because anytime that we’ve taken him along between roughly March and October they announce that he’s got a fever and can’t get the vaccination. Even outside that time, it’s often warm enough for him to “have a fever” so we’re lucky if we manage one vaccination per year.
So, whilst the icecream vans appear in Northern Ireland in March at perhaps 15c, you’d be unlikely to find anything similar below 25c over here.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.An Australian, an Irishman and a Frenchman…
An Australian, an Irishman and a Frenchman were sitting in a pub.
Australian: Gee, it’s wet today.
Irishman: Sure is, almost as wet as we get in the west coast of Ireland.
Frenchman: You’re not French. You’re not allowed to criticise the weather in France. I’m going to start a poster campaign against you and have someone come round and smash your place up.
Australian: Wow, do you mean that the weather in France is just the same as it is here in Belfast today?
This one is specially for SuperFrenchie 🙂
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Google pagerank and site value
|
|
As we write this we are languishing at PR2 which is “below average” but then we’ve only had this domain registered for a fairly short time.
What is a little peculiar to look at are some of the values the pagerank prediction tools are producing at the moment for the site.
For me, the most interesting collection of little site monitoring tools is that at iWebTool which has recently changed it’s prediction from a quite respectable PR5 to a PR6. Will we get that next time round though? I can’t honestly see us sitting at PR6 this time next month (the pagerank review is due in early April) but PR5 would be quite nice. They arrive at these predictions basically by looking at the number of backlinks (ie links to) our site. So, when the last pagerank review came up a few months ago we had around 1000 links to our site and thereby ended up with PR2. That was a so-so start though I think we’d have been PR3 if the site had been in operation longer. Now though we have almost 10,000 links to the site picked up by iWebTool and almost as many again when I look at the site via google’s webmaster tools. That’s more links than all the rest of my sites put together so I think it’s fairly safe to say that the minimum PR next time will be 4 and might be 5 if the site is now old enough for it’s age not to act as a drag on the pagerank. Does the pagerank really matter though? Well, the figure quoted by google probably doesn’t but what is obvious is that the pagerank that they’re using internally for FP is much higher than PR2 as the site appears considerably higher in searches than it did a few months ago (or even last month for that matter). Ironically, all this improvement in FP has happened despite me doing virtually no promotion of the site whereas even with a good deal of effort being put into promoting a number of my other sites, none have had the performance improvement that FP has had. So great is that improvement, that I’m toying with the idea of restructuring some of the sites as blogs. |
Buying a house in france: part 14: housing: your house in the UK
We’re looked at French housing, but what about your house in the UK?
Even if you are absolutely certain that you are going to spend the rest of your life in France, it’s best to retain your house in the UK if you can so that you have a fall-back position in case things don’t work out in France or you change your mind about living here. Not everyone is able to maintain houses in two countries of course and it will probably make finances a little tighter in France than they would otherwise be. However, once you sell your house in the UK you can find it very difficult to get back into the housing market. In our own case, our UK house went up over 40% in less than three years and effectively beyond our reach had we sold it when we moved.
If you are lucky enough to be able to keep it, you should try to rent it out. Not only will this keep the house occupied but it will help pay the mortgage etc. without needing to rely on income from France to pay for the various bills that will arise in the UK.
If you are going down the rental route, you will almost certainly need to change your mortgage to a buy to let one as few normal residential mortgages allow you to rent out your property easily. Your house insurance also needs to change to reflect the fact that you will have tenants in the house and that it may be unoccupied for extended periods of time between tenants (don’t rely on 100% occupancy!).
Although you could try to find tenants yourself, it’s much simpler to arrange the rentals through a letting agency as they can arrange for work to be done and to inspect the house before during and after each tenancy. This service usually costs around 10% of the rental income plus advertising costs of around 100 in advance of each tenancy.
Costs will continue during periods that you don’t have tenants. For instance, you are still liable for aspects of the electricity, gas and water bills. Throughout your ownership you also need to pay council tax / rates and, of course, insurance.
It’s difficult to be definitive about this decision. Keeping a house in the UK does entail a lot of costs from insurance to mortgage not to mention the additional effort that you need to put into managing your house (even if you have a letting agent). However, selling can be quite a permanent thing to do if you live in an area where prices move quickly and, to my mind, it’s best to retain your house as a fall-back should things in France not work out as you expect.
If you do decide that selling is the best option for you, it’s best to get this in motion before you leave the UK as otherwise you could find yourself liable for French capital gains tax on the proceeds of any sale.
Separately, but related to this topic, is the issue of maintaining a UK postal address. This is one thing that is definitely advantageous to do. If you can change the address for several credit cards to that of a friend or family member before you go, this will effectively move your credit history to their address which we have found to be very useful over the years.
Next week, we move onto French banking.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
