-
Reflections on Bureaucracy and Daily Life in France
- 2025/03/20
- 再生時間： 17 分
- ポッドキャスト
-
サマリー
あらすじ・解説
A few decades ago while working in Massachusetts, I had an employee who was an Italian citizen, but a permanent resident of the United States. In fact, he was born in Italy to Italian parents who already lived in the U.S., and he had lived almost his entire life in America. It was his personal choice to not become an American citizen. He therefore had to make periodic visits to the immigration office to renew his residency and work permits—and everyone in the office heard in detail about the bureaucratic nightmare that confronted him on these occasions—an undignified combination of complexity and dysfunction.Moving to Ireland from the U.S. my family got a taste of similar bureaucratic processes: obtaining green cards, annual visits to the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) to renew our visas, and all of the other issues that involve some kind of public service in the country. These included getting a PPS number (Personal Public Service number—the Irish equivalent of a Social Security number), applying for a Drugs Payment Scheme (DPS) card, etc. We even had to take driving lessons and pass a rigorous driving test to obtain driving licences (I failed my first road test). Then of course there were annual interactions with the tax authority, the social welfare office, and more.Visas and work permits aside, these are mostly normal things that have counterparts in the U.S.—it’s just that in the U.S. they come at you over the course of time and aren’t compressed into a relatively short transitional period. The biggest nuisance we faced as newcomers in Ireland was the full day it would take each year to renew our visas—sometimes it took three hours of queuing outside just to enter the building. And it got more expensive every year. We were naturalised as citizens after five years and one of the advantages thereafter was not having to make the dreaded annual trip to the GNIB. Apart from this we found the bureaucratic systems in Ireland to be, if anything, simpler and easier to negotiate than their U.S. equivalents. Being citizens of an E.U. country also made our eventual transition to living in France in retirement easier than it would have been otherwise.France has an undeniable reputation for having a demanding bureaucracy. Indeed, it is sometimes identified as the country that defined the modern bureaucratic state. French people embrace the stereotype and sometimes complain resignedly about it. Many expatriate commentators and consultants in the ever-growing move-to-France cottage industry also highlight this as both a necessary hurdle in moving to France from outside the European Union, and as a way of life thereafter.But I’m happy to to say that, to me, the hype about oppressive French bureaucracy hasn’t lived up to its reputation, at least not for us.I admit: part of this is because as a citizen of Ireland and therefore of the European Union we enjoy freedom of movement within the E.U.—we do not require special permission to live and work in France, so no need for visas or a carte de séjour. We do not plan to operate a business. We also qualify for the benefits of the national health insurance system, the Assurance Maladie, by simply transferring our health benefits in Ireland to France, accomplished by completing a standardised E.U. form (Form S1). Other than this our transition involved a minimum of government bureaucracy—all that comes to mind is the process of exchanging our Irish drivers licences for French ones.Bureaucracy also exists in the private sector, of course, and settling in France involves managing a range of things that, again, have their American counterparts. In our case these involved leases, insurance policies (including our “top-up” insurance or mutuelles to cover the share of medical expenses not paid by the national health insurance framework—the Assurance Maladie), setting up contracts for utilities and phone service, etc.The only truly difficult issue in this domain is the much-discussed challenge of obtaining a bank account. International banks are obligated to report to the IRS on the bank holdings of U.S. citizens (thanks to FATCA) and on this basis private banks often refuse to open accounts for American citizens. (Think of this as a situation where public-sector American bureaucracy gets layered upon private-sector French bureaucracy.) Once you have identified a bank willing to accept you as a customer, the bank will also require of you a full disclosure of your income and assets. This invariably takes the uninitiated by surprise. (Some are also surprised that getting a loan from a bank can be nearly impossible without income sourced in France or a contrat de travail à durée indéterminée, or CDI.)So yes, there are a number of bureaucratic processes to attend to when one transitions to France from another country. We did not find the transition any more challenging than moving to Ireland, other than the bank account issue (admitting ...