Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

I participated in quite an extended debate on an excellent English language website written by a French expat living in America recently.

Along the way a number of issues were raised which I never really thought a great deal about before and it was interesting to see a French view expressed on many of them. One in particular was their view that you just couldn’t separate language from culture. From a French perspective the two are indivisible: you can’t have French culture without it being in the French language.

We introduced the various terms involved in the area of visas, residence permits and immigration in our last entry. Now it’s time to take you through the simplest of these.The simplest case of immigration to France is where you are a citizen of one of the established European countries and are coming to France to work as either an employee or for yourself. Established European countries are those that have been in the European Union for more than four years; if it’s been in the union for less than four years then transitional arrangements may apply.

This section also applies to you if you are French and if you have dual/multiple nationalities so long as one of those nationalities is European.

If this applies to you and all your family, then you just need to come to France and there are no documentation requirements at all beyond those which a French citizen would need to meet. In practical terms, the French must treat you as though you were French and had always been French. This doesn’t mean that there is no paperwork to be done though! For example, if you up a business then you will need to register that business just as a French person would have to (see our section on employment for more information on this).

Although the heading says “intending to work”, you can also move on the same basis if you are receiving a pension or other income sufficient to support yourself and your family. In practical terms, this means an income of something like 1000‚€ or more per month but that’s largely irrelevant as the French don’t seem to apply this criteria.

If you’re in one of the new European countries for which transitional arrangements apply. In practical terms, so long as you have a job lined up there doesn’t seem to be any distinction between the new and the old European countries.

Fortunately, this section covers 90% or more of the immigrants to France from other European countries. In our next edition, we’ll look at another simple case which covers those who aren’t European but have a European spouse.

Boris over at France This Way writing about the upcoming French elections reminds me that I’m registered to vote here and perhaps I should find out some more about the people who I might be asked to vote for.

Although registered to vote here, I can only vote in the local and European elections, not the national ones that Boris talks about. Still, it’s interesting to read his take on the policies being proposed by the leading candidates.

Sarkozy definitely sounds like the candidate that France needs. Unfortunately, going by past performance he would more than likely back down from his policies in the face of certain public demonstrations against reductions in benefits. Does that mean that France needs Royal with her policies of increasing benefits and just borrowing more and more to pay for it? Boris suggests that getting him elected and driving France to the abyss would get someone strong enough to pull France out of the hole next time around but I don’t think it would: France would just go sailing over the abyss with spiralling unemployment as it became too expensive to employ people and too difficult to entice people to work anyway when the benefits were so high.

I for one would be quite happy to remain unemployed until retirement age if I was getting paid 90% of what I previously earned. After all, that would free me up from the expenses of going to work each day and would almost certainly mean that I’d get more net “pay” than I was before. Why would anyone be daft enough to look for work under those circumstances?

In fact, the only fly in the ointment in this scenario is that France quite clearly doesn’t have enough money to pay for the pensions that it’s contracted to pay for. At present, there doesn’t appear to be any option other than “pay as you go” schemes in France. These are wonderful inventions which mean that as soon as the scheme is introduced all those presently retired get a full pension which is paid for by those currently working. Unfortunately, since they aren’t funded the whole system depends on having a reasonable number of people working for each person retired.

When old age pensions were first introduced in the UK way back in 1908 for over 70s, the average life expectancy was 50 ie most people died before they received their pension. Now though, with life expectancy over 70, most people do receive their pension. So whilst in 1908 it was no problem paying the pensions in that most people didn’t live long enough to get them, now we find taxes increasing more and more to cover pension payments and yet still there is no “money in the pot” to pay for them.

So what will happen in France? I think that regardless of who is elected, social contributions and benefits will remain high because no French polician is prepared to stand up against the certain protests against reducing benefits. So, the country will have to borrow more. That’s not a sustainable strategy and sooner or later the lenders will call a halt. When they do, it will more than likely be catastrophic for France with widespread and substantial cuts in benefits and taxes called for accompanied by privatisation of just about everything I suspect.

Once you have your website properly set up on the Internet and listed in the search engines, you can expect to start receiving scam bookings. In fact, if you aren’t receiving them it’s an indication that you haven’t got your site listed properly.There are many variations on the scam theme these days but they have a number of characteristics in common, namely that the spelling & grammar are bad, the e-mail address is one of the free yahoo or hotmail ones and that the booking is for an usually large number of rooms. However, we’ve also received genuine bookings that meet all three criteria so sometimes you need to check a little further before you reject such a booking.Other common themes are that the main source of them is Nigeria, they’re usually from a “Christian organisation” and that they want you to bill them extra and buy mobile phones or rent cars with the excess. Sometimes, they will even quote a credit card number which works but you’ll find that in due course the card turns out to be stolen and the bank take the money charged off you.

Whilst old-timers at the holiday rental business will tell you that they can spot these straight away, when I ran a genuine example past them they rejected that too because it was for 10 rooms, it was from janine79@yahoo.com and the grammar was bad yet we banked a fair amount of money from this one last year. It did take a couple of e-mails and a search for the acting company they quoted to convince me that it was real though.

Frenchless in France raised the issue of how ethical it really was for Switzerland to be neutral during the war.

I’ve always thought of it being a noble thing to be neutral but as she pointed out there is another side to that neutrality. Swizerland turned away many refugees that could have escaped persecution under the Nazi regime. Yes, there were many Swiss who did help a great many refugees but as a nation they rejected all of them. Aside from that there is the issue as to what would have happened had the war gone Hitler’s way. Would that neutrality have been respected had Switzerland found itself surrounded by Nazi occupied countries? I think not.