Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

This section very briefly covers the variety of circumstances that may apply and how you might go about moving to France if they apply to you. There are just too many combinations and special circumstances to adequately cover all of the possibilities so hopefully this will give you a feel for how you might ease your transition to France.

If you are a visa national (ie a citizen of a country requiring a visa to enter France), then your first hurdle is the French embassy in your country of residence. There are many visa categories but the simplest lie in the areas of family reunification or if you already have a job offer in France.

I imagine that for most people the “job offer” option is most likely to apply. Obviously if you already have a job lined up there’s no problem but if you’d like to organise one, see our section on employment coming soon.

Finally, don’t forget that if you have parents or grandparents who are Irish or were born in Ireland pre-1922 or in the Republic of Ireland after that then you are Irish and can simply apply for an Irish passport and thereby come under the very simplest case which we covered at the start of this segment.

We seemed to go directly from Autumn to Spring this year in the Pyrenees and the fruit trees have already started to flower as you can see.

Something of a disasterous year for the ski-ing, at least for us, as we’d have needed to go much farther than usual to find snow. Having said that, we’re incredibly lazy with the ski resorts and don’t look for anything much further than 90 minutes or so drive. If we were a bit more keen, we could have ventured further afield and went to one of the higher altitude resorts though going by the snow on Canigou, they had a much shorter than normal season too At the current rate of going, I don’t think we’ll ever finish off the heating oil that we bought two years ago! We’ve not had that much in the way of wind (usually the thing that really chills things down locally).Even the river running through the village has never filled up this year and we never had to take the long way round to avoid the flooded bridge. The local habit of building “bridges” that just skim over the top of the water makes for cheaper bridges but normally the result is complete chaos for perhaps 10 days or so during the Winter when you find what “route submersible” means.

We covered the very simplest case last week ie that of Europeans from established European countries intending to work. This case is almost as simple but does involve some paperwork.

If your spouse is from a country that’s been in Europe for less than four years then transitional arrangements may apply and will almost certainly be applied if there are any as France really loves documentation.

As before if you have “sufficient resources” (generally 1000‚€ a month or more) you are treated as though you were intending to work.

If you are from a country which requires a visa to enter France, then you still need to get it from the country in which you are living. However, they aren’t allowed to charge you for it and they can’t refuse it either. Once you reach France, you should go along to the mayor’s office (mairie) in your commun and apply for a Carte de Séjour Européenne. You’ll need to bring along your passport, that of your European spouse and proof of relationship (eg marriage certificate) plus two passport photos of you (none are required for the European citizen). Within 90 days, you should receive the Carte de Séjour (residence permit). These are the only documents that they are allowed to ask for but in practice they will often ask for considerably more; if this is the case you aren’t required to provide them but will probably need to quote the European law. You can get the same permit for the parents, grandparents, children or grandchildren of either you or your spouse regardless of their nationality. Before you bother to go down this path, bear in mind that if you have parents or grandparents who were Irish or born in Ireland pre-1922 or the Republic of Ireland after that then you are Irish and can therefore apply for an Irish passport which in turn means that you come under the simple case covered last week.

This section is one that doesn’t apply if you are French (unless you have dual/multiple nationalities) as the European law being used only applies if you are moving countries. Actually, in theory you could apply if you had lived in a European country other than France: there are always exceptions in immigration law.

Next week we’ll venture out into the more complex circumstances that can arise.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing the first post of this blog to say that we’d gotten the mortgage for our place in France yet that was 199 posts ago, hence this retrospective on life as a blogger since then.

Those of you who have been reading this since the start may remember the days when it was Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings were on topics relating to the preparations for our move to France and later on various aspects of settling into life in France. We’re gradually collecting the fruits of our experience of this on our Buying a House in France postings so that others can learn from our mishaps and mistakes.

Eventually we managed to pass the hurdles that the French administration put seemingly at every step of our journey though it wasn’t really as bad as that. In fact, most of the time all we needed was a “roadmap” to guide us as to where to go at each point and hopefully the reference version of our series on moving to France will eventually amount to that for those who come after us.

The end of the hurdles seemed to come all of a sudden and y’all can see when that happened by glancing at the number of posts per month. One day we looked and found that there’d been nothing written for months! It wasn’t that we weren’t busy but that there wasn’t much particularly new or striking to write about after we’d broken through the barrier of French administration, or nothing that would fit within the confines of Mas Camps News at any rate.

But over that time of nothing there was quite a buildup of topics that we should have been writing about and so the blog was reborn in its new home just last Summer. No more is it “Mas Camps News” for we’ve pretty much settled into life here and though it retains aspects of its incarnation as “Living in France without a TV crew” it’s quite a different beastie these days touching on pretty much everything that we come across here and when we’re out and about.

The main thing that has changed though is that it’s living as a proper blog these days rather than a hi-tech newsletter for the folks back home. That’ll probably change things a lot over the next 200 entries as we’re attracting readers from the outside world these days. Indeed just recently we were asked by France24 to contribute our views on the upcoming French election.

We’ve also recently given birth to a second blog where Wendy’s getting started on discussing life from an Australian perspective and we’re even considering a third (’tis an addictive hobby).

In years gone by the French were one of the most backward nations in the world with their use of the Internet. They stuck resolutely to their France-only Minitel system and, for the most part, refused to have anything to do with the American-dominated Internet.

That situation is changing very quickly. For example, whilst we had our first ever online reservation from a French person just two Summers ago, nowadays they are commonplace. So, it’s not surprising that the election campaign has gone online in an equally big way. Blogs are coming to be an expected part of that with the Royal campaign blog started early on and campaigning even taking place on SecondLife. Not so long ago, I’d have said that the SecondLife campaign office was totally crazy but apparently the swing against the recent EU referendum was started with the blog from an obscure teacher in Marseille so it would appear possible to swing public opinion in the real world from our vantage point in the virtual one, even in France.

But what about the real politics? Royal prefers intuition to ideology and is said to be good on the “small things” that arise in truly local politics and weak on the bigger picture. She is deliberately vague and promises to consult the people which are, in some ways, excellent approaches. The problem is that when one consults the people one finds out what the people want, not necessarily what they need.

Where she is more specific there are clear contradictions in her policies. In her economic policy objectives she wants to raise the minimum wage substantially, to abolish the CNE labour law (which makes hiring & firing easier for small companies) and to promote even more mass-unionisation (in an already highly unionised country), all clear job destroyers. Yet, on the other hand, she also hopes to create 500,000 youth jobs, generate training opportunities for longer term unemployed youths and even review the 35 hour week. Those two groups of objectives seem to be in clear opposition. Throughout her policies there is the underlying strand of more state intervention with talk of state aid (barely mentioned elsewhere in the world), increased tax on dividends (thus discouraging investment), state regulation of banking fees (no doubt to support the indigenous banks) and renationalisation of EDF/GDF.

What about Sarkozy though? Well, to our eyes he appears more of a “normal” western European politician with his hopes to encourage the job creators to return home to France, to cut taxes and generally free up the state burden on the population. However, he’s unlikely to do much about the farming subsidies or go far to address France’s head in the sand approach to globalisation.

The problem that both face on behalf of the country is that, whilst they might complain about their taxes, the French like their cozy system of benefits and jobs for life. After all, why would anyone want to bother working a 40 hour week when they could work a 35 hour week for the same salary? For that matter, if Royal’s proposal to take unemployment benefit to 90% of that received from one’s previous job, why would anyone want to work at all? This approach is quite typically French in totally ignoring what the rest of the world is getting up to. That, of course, is the main problem with French politics. For example, when an attempt was made to make it easier to hire & fire young people in early 2006, the predictable result was riots in the streets and, equally predictably, a climbdown by the government. Whilst the people needed jobs, what they wanted were jobs for life.

I suspect that this time around the French people will get what they want which is pretty much what Royal has on offer. However, what they need is Sarkozy, if he’s strong enough to push through his policies in spite of certain opposition to a number of them.