Service garuntees citizenship! Would you like to know more?
Jokes aside, seems reasonable enough to grant citizenship for those who have performed exceptional civic duty.
Jokes aside, seems reasonable enough to grant citizenship for those who have performed exceptional civic duty.
To have the strength to stay a good person through all of that is a big achievement. This is why I think showing as a society doing things the right way counts.
This is the foundation of the unwritten societal contract: if you go by the rules everything will turn out well for you. If you break the rules, act egoistic etc, you might end up in a bad place.
This is why stuff like coruption, worker exploitation, tax evasion etc is worse than just stealing the people's money — it is also undermining the trust into that unwritten societal contract.
This contract is of course fiction Which means that believing into it is either optimistic or naive depending on your country. But if it breaks down thing will only get much worse
This was years ago, so things may have changed now.
If you're not generally at risk of experiencing racism (ie. you are of the majority ethnic group), of course it is easy to rule out. It's hardly a glass half empty/half full type of problem.
These statements from your comment and the parent comment to seem to mean essentially the same thing.
> All that can be perceived as racist is not necessarily so
> It's extremely difficult to determine what negative action is motivated by racism and which isn't
The difference is how likely you are to assume possible racism is actual racism. The "glass half full/empty" metaphor expresses that difference quite well.
I addressed this quite clearly:
If you're not generally at risk of experiencing racism (ie. you are of the majority ethnic group), of course it is easy to rule out. It's hardly a glass half empty/half full type of problem.
A glass half empty/half full metaphor implies that the perception is simply down to personal optimism, which as I said, is clearly a gross oversimplification.
Of course someone who is at risk of experiencing racism is more likely to judge an act to be racist, but that doesn't make them right. In fact, they may be more likely to attribute innocent acts to racism, just as someone who rarely experiences racism is likely to make the opposite judgement more often than is justified.
My point is that we are arguing about something that was already expressed by the parent under what I believe to be a more generous interpretation of their use of that metaphor.
One needs to show that they have stayed in France sufficiently long to have had the “valeurs de la République” (values of the Republic) imbued in them, as well as speak a decent level of French and to have been well integrated in society.
FWIW the overall wait time to become a French citizen is much less than most other European countries.
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 of.
This can be especially heartbreaking when one has to take a time off just to appear in city Y, spend money on transport, and then find out that the only person that can accept the application has not arrived to the office, and so the whole trip was for nothing (personal experience).
Countries seem to have a hard time explaining spending money on efficient dealing with immigration. The whole immigration process is highly stressful even in the EU; I can't imagine how stressful it is in the US, which treats immigrants quite poorly (in my humble opinion).
Add the factor that the public service does not have the same kind of incentives (and being a native of the country makes you know about the ways of making things work - foreigners don't know that usually)
Granted, not all countries are like that. And while people might complain about German bureaucracy, they at least make an effort to do things by the book (meaning: if your appointment says a certain time, you'll be seen at that time)
And American bureaucracy also has its quirks and complications when seen from outside.
The case where it isn’t is for people not born from French parents or not married to a French citizen (plus a couple of other exceptions). In this case, the criteria for naturalisation are clearly spelled out in the law. It should not be arbitrary.
The current mess is because governments want to limit immigration without touching the law to tighten the criteria, for purely political reasons. The French government actually knows how to run large administrations quite well when there are incentives to do so.
It took roughly the same time for almost everyone that I know that applied. The only cases that I know of that took longer were people with "exotic" statuses, e.g. people who didn't live full time in France and owned businesses in different countries that they had to visit often to physically tend to.
My gf is applying for citizenship at the moment, I've described the timeline for her situation. It's been now more than 3 years since she started her application, including 14 months waiting for their decision. And she'd been living in France for more than 10 years before that and graduated from a French university.
It probably would have been easier to just get married...
BTW, congratulations for your citizenship. I'm glad it was efficient for you.
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: personal experience with friends and my so.
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.
I think it is easier than getting German citizenship (and others: naturalisation in Switzerland is notoriously very difficult), but it’s not necessarily saying much.
As another commenter said the time can be reduced to 2 year before you can apply but that doesn't mean much. From personal experience, I've been living in france for about 8 years now and everytime I have to deal with immigration services it can be a nightmare.
here is one: after arriving when my visa comme close to an end by a few month I aplied to get a 1 year residency card, I got that card 2 years later just before I got my first diploma.
every 3 months I would have to go to the prefecture at 6/7AM wait outside in the cold only to be told every now and then at 4pm sorry you're not going to pass today try again tommorow. why did I have to go every 3 month? well to give that the exact same papers I gave them the time before, If you didn't have them on you that day because you didn't think you would need to have a copy of the papers you've already given well that too bad for you. after 1year and a half of this, the person with whom I was having the apointement asked by I was here because apparently they can't find my folder. expect I have in my hand a document from this same prefecture aknowledging that I deposited my document and that I can legally stay for the next 3 months (and copies of the previous ones), of course I had to give them on the stop every document they needed or go back and wait for another apointement where you would have to explai the situation once a gain. this meant that every time I had to go to the prefecture I had a backpack on my back with every document I had on my house that I thought could remotly be relevant, because the official list of require documents is for indicative purposes only and they can ask you for a lot more on case to case basis.
second anecdote, if you have a foreign driving living from a country with which france has an agreement with. you have exchange it for a french one once you start working withing the limit of 1 year. At the time I had to the only way to do it is by getting an apointement online, expect the website to get the apointement form is closed, it opne for less than 5 min while crashing continully on a sunday at midnight, after trying for I few month I sent emails explaining the situation -> no reponse and went in person to the prefecture only to be told sorry that's not our problem and was given no clue on how to try to fix this. thanks to covid the process for converting driving licenses is now fully online, I aplied when they first announced this beginning of last summer, I'm still waiting for any news positive or negative.
Then, add all the difficulties an administration can throw at you (you sent an uncertified copy? too bad; the document with the exact title does not exist in your country of origin? Too bad; Records were lost because of a civil war? Too bad; You did not check the box L-430-b on the cf-740 form even though you should have because you were born on a full moon from parents working for a watchamacallit factory? Too bad; etc ad nauseam).
These difficulties depend a lot on where you’re from; it’s quite different for rich Americans than for poor Malians. So yes, it’s generous on paper but the devil is in the implementation details, as with all bureaucracy.
Also, it’s quite expensive if you consider the whole process.
Some comments from the pro-immigrant side astound me...
France has one of the most generous immigration policies imo. Citizenship in 5 years can easily be obtained by an highly-educated and skilled immigrant. They don't demand an exceptional knowledge of French or French customs and values.
Source:- considered it a few years back, decided against it