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Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

bbc.com

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Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#91

Post by hef19898 »

Jacqued wrote: post #66
pseudo0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems rather lax already, to be honest. France requires five years of residency, the ability to speak French, and a basic understanding of French culture and civics. That really seems like the bare minimum for the state to take on a lifetime, irrevocable responsibility for a prospective immigrant.

It's not five years to citizenship. After five years you get to apply. Then it takes about 4 years of administrative hell (with some traps that can get you back to square one) to get there. No one who is at all familiar with the French immigration system would tell you that it's "lax". It's generally a nightmare to navigate and it feels like it's designed to deter all but the most determined immigrants. Source: perso…

Anecdata, but a Cuban friend of ours has a French wife. Able to apply after 5 years and more or less got his French passport immediately after handing in the necessary documents and passing interviews and language tests. All in the same year he applied. Maybe it's different because of marriage, no idea.

When you are not in France, the hardest part is to find someone to administer the necessary language test. Last time I checked there were two institutes in Germany with the proper certification, one in Frankfurt and one in Berlin. Then Covid hit I didn't check again.

Paperwork seems to be a pain in the ass, so. That being said, it seems easier than getting German citizenship.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#92

Post by sofixa »

Jacqued wrote: post #66
pseudo0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems rather lax already, to be honest. France requires five years of residency, the ability to speak French, and a basic understanding of French culture and civics. That really seems like the bare minimum for the state to take on a lifetime, irrevocable responsibility for a prospective immigrant.

It's not five years to citizenship. After five years you get to apply. Then it takes about 4 years of administrative hell (with some traps that can get you back to square one) to get there. No one who is at all familiar with the French immigration system would tell you that it's "lax". It's generally a nightmare to navigate and it feels like it's designed to deter all but the most determined immigrants. Source: perso…

When was that? Today the waiting time announced is 12-18 months, and personal experience, even with Covid and two lockdowns it took a bit more than a year.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#93

Post by [deleted] »

roel_v wrote: post #52
HeavenFox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...whereas three years of service in French Foreign Legion allows you to apply for citizenship, or immediately after you are wounded in battle ("French by spilled blood")

Serving in the Foreign Legion is not like 'being in the military' in other places...

[deleted]

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#94

Post by barry-cotter »

KaiserPro wrote: post #58
jeofken wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because natives inherit the land from their forefathers.

Yeah but you are missing the essential part of the french empire: you're french. So most of north africa has french ancestors.

You’re confusing the French Empire and Metropolitan France. Algeria was part of Metropolitan France, the rest of what we’d now can the Empire wasn’t. All of France’s remaining extra-European possessions have every right French in the Hexagon do, and are French citizens. Algerians had it extremely easy moving to and naturalist got in France for decades after de Gaulle left Algeria. And Algeria was treated as French in law until such time as the French left. Thus the spat between the two countries in the 70s over children of Algerian immigrants automatically being granted French citizenship at 18. That was because their parents had been born in what was then France.

France and the Empire were not legally coextensive, and Tunisia and Morocco were never legally part of France. The generation that were born in what was legally France are done having children too.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#95

Post by trextrex »

mtarasevicius wrote: post #82
cryptica wrote: post #81

This sounds nice but whenever I hear something like this or any kind of philanthropy, I always think of all the people who missed out because of some technicality. What about people who were in the final stages of studying to be a nurse and were waiting for the government to send back some paperwork to begin work on the front line and they missed out on the citizenship by a few weeks... Or people who lost their job t…

perfect is the enemy of good...

Random acts of philanthropy like this are just that -- random and benefiting a very small number of random people. While there is no problem with that per se, people should have access to a decent life through fair, well defined systems rather than having to depend on some arbitrary system of lottery.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#96

Post by tzs »

bruceb wrote: post #78
thefounder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a country made of and built by immigrants doesn't want immigrants anymore. I think that culture has a name: hypocrisy

There have always been limits to immigration. Almost no one is saying no immigration. Needs change. What the country needs now might not be the same as 150 years ago.

> There have always been limits to immigration.

The first limit on immigration in the US was the Page act in 1875, which restricted immigration of Chinese women.

Before that there were no limits.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#97

Post by pjc50 »

BossingAround wrote: post #69
yodsanklai wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you are eligible for citizenship (which can take a long time) You must 1. take an appointment to have your document checked (waiting time 1 year) 2. take an appointment to submit the actual application (1 year) 3. wait for the result, 1 1/2 year. So by the time you are eligible, it can take 3-4 years before you know the outcome of your application. These 3-4 years don't serve any obvious purpose that I can think…

That's the real problem in a lot of EU countries. This, coupled with highly inefficient ways of delivering results, appointment dates/locations, or inefficient locations in general (e.g. you reside in city X yet you have to appear in person in city Y that is 200km away just to submit a form). This can be especially heartbreaking when one has to take a time off just to appear in city Y, spend money on transport, and t…

The inefficiency is deliberate. It's a way of controlling immigration numbers without being seen to do so.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#98

Post by ithastobe »

neither_color wrote: post #22
conanbatt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is in spite of immigration policy, not because of it.

Which policy? The latest H1-B bill which lifts per-country caps passed unanimously in the senate and with a strong majority in the house. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1044 Certainly different people will have different opinions on what the "right" number of immigrants is but this is not an anti-immigrant country.

This bill failed to pass in the house eventually after senate passed the initial house bill with amendments.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#99

Post by sofixa »

barry-cotter wrote: post #73
tomp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There needs to be a balance. Unlimited immigration is unsustainable (Europe can’t support 3bn people), so there have to be some limits. Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture. Finally, you need to correctly read the situation. Most pro-immigration people support it to lowe…

Three billion people in the current European Union would be 68 people per square km, about as dense as Mexico or Ukraine. As far as culture goes immigrants assimilate. By the third generation it’s rare to actually be able to speak the language of their ancestors. Catholic immigrants to the US were feared as agents of Rome. Now the average American Catholic has a Protestant conception of what religion is, they’re so m…

It depends. In France, most of the terrorist attacks were committed and planned by radicalised first or second generation "immigrants"(or descendents thereof). They don't feel French, they don't feel like the origin of their parents/etc. so they pick religion.

Re: Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship

#100

Post by 5560675260 »

RobertoG wrote: post #59
randmeerkat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fad to talk-down America. It’s soft power in politics, something the US has been losing for many years now. Anti-Americanism and its rise is something extensively covered in academia over the past two decades, this is just 2020: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=anti+americ...

I think there are two factors to this "fad": one is that USA for being the world superpower and through their media monopoly is always in the spotlight. The second is that USA spend too much time saying how wonderful they are (that if you look to history with a little objectivity is not so wonderful). Reaction to this is almost inevitable. I would like to present a trivial recent example: as you know, USA retired fro…

> in general, is not doing so much like other nations despite being the worst in per capita terms.

Do you have sources to back any part of this statement? It would be surprising to see US doing less and being worth that, for example, Germany and its coal or China and its industrial complex. Otherwise it seems to be another example of "blatantly false anti-US comments like this get voted up without any data to back them up".

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