As someone who has some (immigrant) friends which try/tried to get a foothold in Germany usually the opposite is the norm: You can do everything by the book, be the perfect citizen and in the and you are thanked by daily racism and a bureaucratic maze.
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
I am curious what kind of problem had or have your friends? Usually it is quite straightforward to get citizenship in Germany. Have a job for 7 years and no criminal record, and you can apply. Source: The (formerly) foreign colleagues I know had no problem with the process.
I studied in Germany and then worked there for four years. They counted my years of study toward citizenship which was awesome. This depends on which region you were in though, some regions only counted 7 years after you started working full time.
This was years ago, so things may have changed now.
A glass is seen as either half full or half empty. All that can be perceived as racist is not necessarily so. There could be a number of reasons for unpleasant outcomes, none more likely than the other.
Terrible oversimplification. It's extremely difficult to determine what negative action is motivated by racism and which isn't.
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.
I think you've interpreted your parent post a little harshly.
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.
> 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.
I am not questioning the clarity of your expression, but your narrow interpretation of the metaphor. It does not imply that judgements about racism are purely a matter of optimism or pessimism. It already incorporates the fact a person's influences cause them to make those judgements.
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.
France always had a way to citizenship called, I paraphrase here, "citizenship by blood spoiled". Quite often used in case of members of the foreign legion. It basically says, that when you get hurt or wounded while serving the French Republic you are eligible to become a French citizen. Fair enough, if you ask me.
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: personal experience with friends and my so.
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.
Being married to a French citizen makes things much, much easier. You still have to apply to filter out obviously problematic cases (and convenience marriages just for the purpose of getting citizenship) but otherwise it is mostly automatic.
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.
Yes it's different because of marriage. It's 10 years of presence in France, that you can prove. Through marriage it's shorter, but you get the special 'white marriage' procedure to make sure you're not in it for the citizenship. Prove that you live and have been living together, that you've been a couple for some time... Didn't like this process at all.
Then I have something to look forward to, haven't I? Living abroad, outside of France, may change things again. Maybe next year, but I keep telling this myself for 3 years now. Hopefully kids and house will make that white marriage thing easier!
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.
That’s the theory. Then you have appointments one year in the future. Of course you have to be there otherwise you have to wait months for another one. You also have to be there early because having an appointment does not necessarily mean that there will be someone for you, it just means that you can queue on that day. You might also have to travel quite a bit because the office to which you have to go is allocated unpredictably.
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.
well that the theorical rules, in practice things can vary wildly. expescially on which prefecture/department you have to apply from.
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.
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.
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 of.
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 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).
While citizenship is a privilege, not a right, decades, or maybe centuries of bureaucratic procedures pile up and are not reviewed/simplified ending up with situations like that
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.
It is a right for a lot of people. How could it be a democracy if citizenship weren’t a right?
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.
I did the procedure in arguably the préfecture under the most pressure (Paris), and from the day I applied, it took 9 months to get the interview and 6 months to get the citizenship. That was it, less than 1.5 years in total.
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.
When was it? A few years ago, they added a new requirement that you don't apply directly to the "prefecture" but you have to go through an additional step which takes about a year.
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.
It’s really not. That is 5 years (two if you came for a degree), which is the time after which you’re supposed to be acquainted with the language and the culture (which is fair enough). The delays are after that to get appointments and stuff. These are purely a consequence of the bureaucratic process, which is quite arbitrary in its implementation (as an example, depending on your country of origin you might have to go to different offices, which process files at very different speeds).
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
Jokes aside, seems reasonable enough to grant citizenship for those who have performed exceptional civic duty.