Immigration Policy and Local Politics: IRE Act

In a national election year immigration policy is one tool among many for domestic politicians to attempt to garner votes.  Most of what hits the media are harsh initiatives to restrict immigration in the name of saving domestic jobs or calming an electorate fearful of being swamped by strange people with funny accents and odd customs. People like me. :-)

But behind the scenes the situation is much more complicated.  Business is certainly not interested in restricting immigration and they contribute heavily to campaigns.  Many sending countries want their nationals to be allowed entry so they can send remittances back to the home country and they actively lobby the politicians in the host country.  Citizens themselves have family and friends who are immigrants and they will vote against anti-immigrant candidates.  My daughter, for example, was quite impressed by Marine Le Pen right up until she learned about her views on immigration and dual nationality - she is not about to vote for someone who may cause harm to her immigrant mother.  In the U.S. the Republican party is committing political suicide in a similar manner - there are many Hispanic voters in the U.S. who are not likely to vote for someone who suggests that their friends and family members ought to be handcuffed and deported.

A few very smart politicians have figured this out and, instead of joining the rhetoric against immigrants, they are finding ways to use immigration policy to their own ends (getting re-elected).  Just as initiatives against immigrants may play well on the national stage, they see that initiatives for immigrants may play very well locally if they are properly targeted to please an electorate who are members of a particular diaspora.

That seems to be the driver behind a little known bill in the U.S. Congress called the Irish Immigration Recognition and Encouragement Act of 2011 (IRE Act) which would allocate 10,500 visas to Irish nationals wishing to come to live and work in the United States.  This is basically an extension of another visa program called E-3 which is right now only available to Australian nationals.  Yes, my friends, in the middle of a hot national debate over immigration, some elected representatives are trying to increase it.  Who is sponsoring this bill?  Two senators, Scott Brown (Republican-Massachussetts) and Mark Kirk (Republican-Illinois).  Both these states have large Irish-American populations and this bill (as well as another being proposed by Senator Charles Schumer) seems to be quite popular.  In this article Senator Brown explains the rationale behind the bill:

“This measure is crucially important to an Irish community that maintains strong historical and cultural ties with the United States,” stated Brown.
Added Brown: “My bill would provide a legal pathway for the thousands of Irish that wish to come to this country legally. It would allocate 10,500 visas per year for Irish nationals under the E-3 visa program, which is currently only available to Australia.
Most importantly, it does not seek to add controversial provisions that would endanger our national security or rule of law. With the bipartisan passage of H.R. 30l2 in the House of Representatives, the Senate has an opportunity to make significant strides towards fixing some of the problems in our legal immigration system.
I strongly believe that the Irish E-3 visa provisions must be included in these negotiations in order to correct the long standing barriers to Irish immigration to the United States and recognize the unique relationship between our countries.”

What I find fascinating about Brown's words is how he has crafted his argument.  Correct me if I'm wrong but what he seems to be saying is 1. the U.S. and Ireland have a long and special relationship 2. increased Irish immigration will not pose a national security or legal problem for the U.S. and 3. the bill is necessary to correct an injustice.  I will not comment on the first two but the last is simply ridiculous. True, American immigration policy changed in the last century to be more diverse and less favorable to European immigration but, nevertheless, today there are around 41 million Americans of Irish descent (one out of five Americans).  Historically the group that has had the most barriers to immigration was not the Irish (or other Europeans) but Asians who in some cases could not even apply for citizenship even when they were allowed entry into the U.S.

I don't want to be too hard on Senator Brown.  His job is to represent his constituents and their interests.  Americans of Irish descent vote and are certainly entitled to ask him for measures that benefit them.  But it does raise some interesting questions.  For one thing this is not simply a domestic matter - there are two nations (the U.S. and Ireland) and one superstate (the EU) involved here.  Is it really to the benefit of Ireland and the EU that the U.S. "poach" their citizens, in particular those highly-qualified professional workers that the EU is trying to lure to Europe through programs like the Blue Card? Did the Senators that proposed this bill talk to anyone other than their local constituents before they proposed it?  What would be the reaction of the U.S. if a European state started a special visa program for highly-qualified American entrepreneurs using arguments very similar to Brown's.  In fact some EU states could go even farther and claim that some Americans, by virtue of their descent, are still Europeans on some level and that the U.S. government should be gracious and share their talents and productivity.  Now, wouldn't that be an interesting idea?

Palais de la découverte

Just before the end of the school vacation the younger Frenchling proposed a trip into town to see the Palais de la découverte.  This is a science museum in the heart of Paris and my daughter has been there many times on school trips.

The weather could have been better that day but it was a still a nice ride into town.  Versailles is not that close to Paris but we are right smack on the RER C line which goes from the Versailles Castle straight into the center of the city (Pont de l'Alma, Champs de Mars/Tour Eiffel).

Our stop was Invalides which is usually just a transfer point for me into the Paris metro.  As we walked through the train station to find the right exit I saw parts of it that I never seen before.  Some really lovely stonework, old doors and grills.  This station is right next to the Seine which occasionally overflows its banks and seeps into the station and even onto the tracks.

We exited right under the Pont Alexandre III one of the largest and gaudiest bridges that cross the Seine.  You either love it or hate it. It was built in 1900 for the World Fair and its one of several monuments in that area that survive from that period - the Grand and Petit Palais are two others.

The Palais de la découverte is in the 8th district on Franklin Delanor Roosevelt Avenue and opened in 1937 in one of the wings of the Grand Palais.  It's quite an impressive building and if you think the outside is amazing, you will be stunned by the interior.

Our area of interest that day was the Astronomy section.  The younger Frenchling is fascinated by theories of the origins of the universe. And of course we had to check out the planetarium as well.  The show was good - very practical in the sense that the presenter tried to help the audience reliably find some of the more obvious and interesting objects in the night sky.

After the show we strolled around and stumbled on a presentation about radiation given by a very enthusiastic young French scientist.


After our visit we strolled around the neighborhood looking for a good place to eat.  Here are some pictures I took as we walked around.  I was very surprised to find this bust of Champlain, the "Father of New France" (aka Quebec).

And this monument to the the Russian soldiers who fought on French soil in the first World War.

Sea Turtles, Seaweed, and Seagulls

There are a lot of grand theories about why people migrate.  I just finished reading The Migration Apparatus by Gregory Feldman and he devotes a lot of space to documenting efforts in Europe to make migrants' motivations and actions"legible".  The idea, of course, is to find some model that would allow states to better understand why people move with an eye toward better controlling that movement.  Technology is their new best friend in this endeavor - if they can just get enough raw data and tie it to a model that fits then they will finally be able to get this all under control.  As an IT person I smell money and work.  As a migrant I am dubious that this will actually do any good at all and may even have some very pernicious side effects for migrants and non-migrants alike.

In parallel I am reading Beyond a Border by Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist.  They have a good overview of some of the more popular theories of migration:  Push/Pull Model, Neoclassical Equilibrium Perspective, Network Theory and New Economics.  All very interesting from a purely theoretical and very academic perspective.  They seem to share my own doubts about the validity of these models.  The models are very pretty, certainly explain some things and seem intuitively plausible but they are also reductionist to the point of absurdity.  Oh, how nice it would be to simply assume economic motivations which would allow one to completely ignore as irrelevant those messy "mixed migration flows."

And then last night I found and read this dissertation by Seth Werner submitted in January of 2012 in support of  his Doctorate in Philosophy.  It's called "Chinese Return Migration and Kunming’s ‘Jia Xiang Bao’ - Hometown Babies."  I loved his approach for several reasons.  He genuflected to theory but he allowed for the evolution of his original ideas through the field research that he conducted with actual migrants.  Yes, he went out and talked to them and made some interesting discoveries which he summarizes and interprets in his paper.  He had the humility as well to admit that he is trying to hit a moving target - neither his framework nor his informants are living in a static world and things are changing even as we attempt to understand them.

Werner primarily looked at a group of people referred to as haigui or "sea turtles," a term used for Chinese who left China for study or work and who subsequently decided to go back.  This phenomenon is of particular interest right now because:

According to recently published statistics from the Chinese Ministry of  Education (MOE), approximately 1.4 million Chinese students and scholars went abroad between 1978 and 2008. It is estimated that 390,000 have since returned, and, of these returnees, almost half have done so from 2005 to 2008 (Ministry of Education, 2010).

The questions he asks are deceptively simple:  what drove these people to emigrate in the first place, what brought them back to China (specifically Kunming) and what has been the experience of these people as they re-integrate?  What follows here is a rough summary of Werner's answers to these questions.

Why did they emigrate?  Some of it had to with policy changes in both the Chinese and the receiving state. Looking at the U.S. the country had traditionally been very hostile to immigration from Asia but this loosened up in the 1960's. But that was probably less significant then changes on the China side with new laws that allowed Chinese to emigrate for private reasons and a policy of encouraging some Chinese to go abroad for higher education.  So the short answer here is that they emigrated because they could or were actively encouraged to do so.  Smart policy because it allowed the Chinese government to use other states' education systems to train and educate their people.

What brought them back to China?  Having encouraged some people to get an overseas education and work experience, China had every interest in enticing them to come back and they offered tangible benefits to those who decide to do so:

For example, over half of university-level administrators in the institutions directly under the Ministry of Education are returnees (Li, 2005). Further, Zhao and Zhu (2009) report that at least three quarters of the presidents of Chinese universities and the academicians at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering have overseas study and/or work experience.

But that isn't the entire story.  To find out more Werner looked at a group of returnees that bypassed the larger cities like Shanghai and settled in Kunming (population 6.5 million) the capital of Yunnan Province.  This is a region that is taking off economically in part because the Chinese government is trying to encourage development beyond the coastal areas.   Werner's case studies really illustrated the multiple variables that migrants had to consider before they made the decision to move back to China and specifically to Kunming.  In one case, it started with the inability of the person to find work in the U.S. in a tight labor market. This was then exacerbated by news from her friends who had returned to China and had found good positions there. So she gave up and returned to China where she had several job offers almost immediately. In another case, the person, after receiving several degrees from European institutions, returned to China and went straight home to Kunming because her parents and her child were there.  She was fully aware that she could have far more opportunities in Shanghai but she liked the slower pace of the regional city where she had family.  Another returnee from New Zealand says he was motivated by the idea of being his own boss - something he saw as less likely in New Zealand where he though he would always be an employee.  His experience and his credentials were unusual and highly marketable in both Shanghai and Kunming.  In New Zealand he was not terribly special, but in Kunming he was a "big fish in a small sea."

These are the success stories.  Are there returnees who are less successful?  Of course, and there is even a word for them.  Werner reports that they are called haidai or "seaweed" because they have trouble finding work.  So there is risk to returning.  There is another group that is also of interest here because they have decided to mitigate the risks by keeping one foot in China and the other in the other passport country. They are called haiou, or “seagulls” and they are frequent travelers between China and Canada, the U.S. or another country.  Sometimes this means leaving a spouse and the children in one passport country and working in China.

Pretty messy, isn't it?  It's almost impossible to put these people into neat categories and come up with grand theories about why they did what they did.  Economics and opportunity certainly played a role but family, conditions in the host country, personal circumstances and the relative benefits and costs of one place over another played an equally important role.  

Now it should be said here that a study like Werner's has some important limitations.  Werner is not Chinese and is not a master of the language.  You can also question the veracity of his informants.  I can say from experience that migrants are not always aware themselves of precisely why they emigrated or returned and what factors were most important in that decision-making process.  Self-deception is a common and very human flaw.

It's still important to read these studies because whatever their limitations or inaccuracies they make clear that there are many motivations for emigration/immigration and if states are going to make policy, this is information that is genuinely useful.  Werner says:

To be successful in attracting these and the Chinese citizens that had left China before them, the Chinese government must look beyond the economic theories of migration to encourage return. In the same way that the Chinese government can‟t rely on economic theories of migration to attract returnees, nations in which Chinese are currently living that are hoping to retain this human capital must also understand their motivations for return migration if they hope to discourage this return.

I think he's 100% right.  Economic motivations are easier to manage and so states get lazy (or desperate) and act as though these are the only considerations that need to be taken into account when they adjust their immigration policies. There is a lot of talk in the U.S. , for example, of how people with good academic credentials ought to be given Green Cards automatically when they graduate from a US university.  Nice idea but it is not necessarily going to make them want to stay long-term in the U.S.  Whether or not they accept depends a lot on other factors like the availability of good work (better perhaps then they could obtain in their home countries),  future opportunities (the future state of the economy), an immigrant-friendly social environment, possibilities for family reunification and so on.  On the China side, getting their people back may be more a function of actively encouraging their emigrants to maintain strong family and social ties with China while they are outside the country and making them aware on a regular basis of the opportunities to be had at home. 

French Elections - Silence Would be Golden

Two stories from the French media recently where the party in power, pushed by the Far Right, has managed to get itself into all kinds of trouble.  Watching this unfold one is very tempted to channel Jacques Chirac who once said this about his allies/adversaries, "Ils ont perdu une bonne occasion de se taire." (They missed a good opportunity to stay silent.)

The first missed opportunity I'd like to mention came from our old friend, Claude Guéant, Minister of the Interior and author of the now infamous "circulaire" against foreign students.

So what did Guéant say this time?   In a speech he gave in early February, he stated that: "Contrairement à ce que dit l'idéologie relativiste de gauche, pour nous, toutes les civilisations ne se valent pas." (Contrary to what the left-wing relativist ideology says, for us, not all civilizations are equal.)  Naturally, people responded to this by asking the obvious questions, "OK, so how do you rank them, sir?" and "Which civilizations do you think make (or don't) the cut?"  And with that we entered very dangerous territory because there are no acceptable answers to those questions that won't drag someone further into the pit.  When questioned about it later Guéant reaffirmed his statement and gave examples like the wearing of the burkha or public prayer.  It was embarrassing to watch him flailing about trying to find the right "code" to get his very negative message across.  Here is a nice bit of reporting on it from TF1.

The second missed opportunity came recently in response to a debate launched by Marine Le Pen concerning meat slaughtered in a fashion that conforms to Islamic tradition and law (halal).  At first Sarkozy replied by saying it was "not a problem" and then he seemed to be calling for new labeling laws.  Let's be generous and say that his views were evolving when his Prime Minister Fillon fearlessly threw himself into the fray in this interview on Europe1.

Basically Fillon suggested that both Moslems and Jews take another look at their ancestral traditions that "n'ont plus grand-chose à voir avec l'état aujourd'hui de la science, l'état de la technologie, les problèmes de santé."  (no longer have anything to do with modern science, technology and health issues.)  Needless to say, both groups are highly unamused by his words.

Following Fillon's performance other French politicians prudently kept their distance from this topic.  Ironically, it was Dominique de Villepin who said exactly what I was thinking - he lamented that  François Fillon "aurait mieux fait de se taire" (would have done better to stay silent.)

If they are incapable of raising the level of the debate and they continue to happily bumble into traps set for them by the Far Right then there is no hope for them and they will deserve everything they get when the election finally rolls around later this year.

Migration between Highly Developed Countries

K left a comment in  response to Friday's post about global migration.  I think we both have the same curiosity about why people migrate from one highly developed country to another - from the US to the EU and vice versa, for example.

You might think that I would be in a good position to talk about this because I did it.  Yes and no.  My experience is not atypical but it doesn't come close to covering the diverse motivations of all the other migrants I've had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with over the years.  Another difficulty when it comes to tackling this topic is that so much is based on the perceptions that people in highly developed countries have of each other and their respective countries.  Before people migrate they are starting from a subjective view of their home country and projecting themselves into a possible future in another place that they think will be better for diverse reasons. But "better" is relative.   Clearly when a person moves from one modern country to another he is not thinking, "Will I have enough to eat there?" "Will there be running water?" or "Are there ATM's?"  He/she is definitely looking for something above and beyond satisfying the most basic needs.

Nonetheless, I think there is overlap between their motivations and those of their brethen who migrate from low to medium development countries:  a better future for their children, security, opportunity.  For that reason I would resist any characterization of these people as "spoiled global elites."  At the risk of sounding un-American, I argue that there are things, tangible and intangible, that may matter much more to some then money or a glorious career.

I spent part of this weekend thinking about how to answer K in a concrete way and I came up with a few themes that seem to come up very often when I talk to migrants from the US to the EU, or from the EU to the US, or from either of those places to Asia.  This is what I've gleaned from just talking to people I've met and come to know over the past twenty years or so.  You may disagree with the items on my list and some of what I report here might irritate you.  Bear in mind that these are things people have told me based on their perceptions of where they came from, where they wanted to go and why they landed on one shore as opposed to another.  They are not necessarily objectively true (most preconceived ideas aren't).  In some cases, the reasons people had for leaving home are so personal that they say next to nothing about the home or host country and everything about that person's particular (often very difficult) situation.

Family:   It is more and more common for people to have families that include multiple nationalities and members living in many different countries.  It can happen very rapidly.  In my own family in THIS generation alone for the first time we now have family members on two continents and three countries with three different nationalities.  More importantly, we are in constant contact with each other via email, Facebook and the like.  This is something that my grandparents (or my spouse's grandparents) would have found inconceivable.  We are talking about intercultural marriages (of which there are an enormous number between EU and North Americans) and the children of these unions and their children.  It's not just about having multiple passports, it's about having multiple close connections (blood or marriage ties) with people in other countries.  I have met any number of people born on one side of the Atlantic who activated a citizenship from a parent or grand-parent in order to spend some time in the other country (US/Canada or the EU).

Established Expatriate Communities:  A migrant from the US to France is walking into history - not just French history but American history. France has been a destination for Americans since before the American Revolution. Those who come here today are following in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway and others.  This is a well travelled path.  There are others.  Today, Americans can find vibrant expatriate communities in the UK, Germany, Japan and Canada.  Other developed countries have very similar migration paths to other developed countries.   France, for example, has a very active expatriate community in Japan, the UK and the United States (check out California).  Like migrants from developing countries these channels are very important when it comes to drawing people to a particular place.

Similar Standards of Living:  These days a middle-class person in France or Germany lives just as well as a middle-class American or Canadian. Yes, there are country differences but the basics are there. Moving to another developed country does not mean deprivation or a very radical change in one's standard of living.  If you had a car in Germany, you can have a car in the U.S.  If you owned a house in the U.K. you can own a house in France.  Basic consumer goods are readily available in all these places.

Relative Differences in Living Standards:  Here is it where begins to get really subjective.  Standards of living may be similar in all highly developed countries but every country has its perceived strong and weak points. Often these are semi-tangible and cannot be measured in monetary terms.  One issue I've seen come up again and again is personal safety.  Some of the Brits I've talked to have the perception that France or Denmark would be much safer places to live. Almost every European I've conversed with had the perception that the U.S. was downright dangerous.  These perceptions matter a great deal because people actually make migration decisions based on them.  It can be as simple as perceiving that Country X is a better place to raise children then Country Y or the home country.

Cultural Capital:  This is even more subjective and involves the accumulation of cultural capital, often  to gain status.  I realize that this sounds terribly elitist but it's true.  Living in a foreign country for a time or being widely traveled with the ability to speak multiple languages is usually perceived positively.  It can be a means by which a migrant from a developed country gains status relative to the sedentary monolingual person in the home country. The "bump" depends on the country of origin and the country of residence.  Americans who go to France and live for awhile, for example, get to write books that sell very well.  Same with the U.K. residents in France.   French residents of Japan or certain cities in the U.S. seem to benefit from a similar halo effect.   This is to be handled with caution because it can also provoke jealousy and resentment.

Opportunities:  Sometimes the credentials from the home country sell better in another developed country.  France is filled with engineering graduates and, depending on the school, that degree may not buy as much opportunity in France or the EU as in a country like Canada or Australia.  An American with a liberal arts degree from a medium-level American university might be better off working abroad as a teacher, for example.  He retains a certain amount of status, puts his degree to good use,  gets foreign experience and avoids the unemployment lines at home.   Credentials can be translated more or less but the real differences are in the markets and some degrees and specialities can be a worth a lot more outside the home country.

Escape:   This is more common then many people realize.  There are people who have got themselves into serious trouble in their home countries:  jail, alcohol or drug abuse, failed marriages and other family problems, business failure.  They want a new life and migrating to another developed country can offer that.  Alcoholics Anonymous refers to this as "pulling a geographic." This is another one that seems to be universal - I've met both French and Americans who have done this.

Political or Social Climate:   I've never seen this be the sole reason people from developed countries migrate but it is a factor. Some people strongly disagree with the direction of politics in the home country and are unhappy enough about it to want to leave. During the Vietnam War, for example, many Americans moved to Canada.   In other cases it has more to do with the social climate.  I've talked to French of African or North African origin who are also eyeing Canada or the U.S. because they perceive that there would be less discrimination there.  African-Americans have a long history of moving to France because, quite frankly, they felt (and some people I've talked to in more recent times still think this is true) they have a higher status and better treatment in France as opposed to the U.S. Most recently, I've talked to some Americans visiting who are deeply concerned about the political gridlock in the U.S. and who wonder if the country could become financially and socially unstable.

I'll stop there because this post is getting very long. I'd love to get your feedback and ideas about this and if anyone has links to studies about migration from one developed country to another, I would be most grateful if you could post them in the comments section.

Gallup World Poll: The Many Faces of Global Migration

This is a great read.  A lot of what we read about migration consists of "after the action" reports.  We wait until the dust settles and then try to figure what happened.  This is one of the first proactive reports I've read that tries to measure how many people are contemplating migration and how many actually do it.  The Many Faces of Global Migration came out of world polls that Gallup has been conducting since 2005 in over 150 countries.  For this report they polled/interviewed 750,000 people.  Here are a few of their findings:

• Out of a world population of around 7 billion people, 630 million want to move permanently to another country.
• A much larger percentage, 1.1 billion adults, in the world want to go work and live in another country temporarily.
• As many as 500 million people will be forced to migrate to other countries because of severe environmental problems in their home countries.

After reading these numbers, please tell Claude Gueant to relax - of the 630 million people who want to move permanently, only 48 million of them have plans to move in the next year or so.

How strong is the desire to migrate and what regions are likely to have large numbers of emigrants?

The desire to migrate is clearly strong in sub-Saharan Africa but the numbers are down from previous years, from 38% to 33% of adults in that region in 2011.  Same trend in Latin America where the percentage of adults wishing to migrate dropped from 23% to 20% and in South-East Asia from 12% to 9%.  The EU is steady at 20% and North America (U.S. and Canada) is also holding at 10%.

And where do these people want to go?  Not surprisingly, North America and the EU are top destinations:  188 million and 178 million respectively.

The most interesting part of the report for me was a section they called "Personal Gains and Losses from Migration." They evaluated the experiences of long-term migrants in 15 European countries between 2009 and 2010 and they matched them with people in their home country who had the same demographic profile.  The idea was to determine how much these migrants really gained from their migration journey.  Did they think they did better in the EU or would they have had similar lives if they had stayed home?  That is a darn good question. 

Gallup found that the gains and losses that migrant long-timers experience largely
depend on the level of human development in their home countries. The bigger the
development gap between their home countries and highly developed European Union
countries, the bigger the likely gains and losses for these migrants.

So...

Long-timers who moved to the European Union from countries with medium and
low human development see sizeable gains in their evaluations of their current lives.
However, at the same time, long-timers from medium and low development
countries are no better off when it comes to their expectations of how their future
lives would be had they stayed home....their perceptions of living comfortably and optimism about standard of living are lower. One possible explanation is that migrants’ expectations about their living standards rose when they moved to their new country

They see gains but are not optimistic about their own future compared to what they might have had.  Their optimism is reserved for their children who they believe will be better off in the host country.

I was a bit disappointed here.  It is such a good question and I think they could have done a much better job in the report of developing the topic further.   And what about migrants from high development countries?  No mention of them but surely there is something to say, if only to state that they found no difference at all between their lives as migrants and their unrealized lives in the home country. 

If any of you do read the report, I would love to get your take on it.

The Path to French Citizenship: Small Steps

This morning my spouse and I, having gathered all the papers for his CNF (Certificat de nationalité française), went down to the Tribunal de grande instance de Versailles.  I'm not sure how to translate that but let's just call it the courthouse.  To understand more about the French legal system and where the Tribunals sit in respect to other courts, Wikipedia has this entry which I thought was very clear and understandable.

Our business was completed very quickly.  I beeped on my way through security because I had a pile of coins in my pocket (train fare) that I had forgotten and so I was taken aside for a more complete check.  Then we took the elevator to the reception desk, got a number, and within a few minutes we were installed in an office and presenting our papers to the charming and very helpful young lady charged with such matters.  As I watched the different papers being passed across the desk, I asked my spouse if he had duplicates at home.  Some of the birth certificates were quite lovely, hand-written with beautiful calligraphy.

Since she was so pleasant and helpful I decided to ask about something that has been bothering me for some time.   I'll take this as an opportunity to tell a good story that you might find entertaining.

When I was married back in 1990 at the Mayor's Office in Courbevoie, the French bureaucracy and I got off to a bad start.  For a reason I no longer remember, my spouse decided to send me (newly arrived immigrant with limited French) down to the Mayor's office to apply for a marriage license.  It was a nightmare for them and for me.  They asked all kinds of questions like my mother's profession that I just didn't have the vocabulary to answer.  The low point however came when they asked about my future spouse's father and I replied that he was a retired military officer.  They then wanted to know his rank and if he had any decorations to which I replied (truthfully)  "Général" and "Légion d'honneur."

How to describe their reaction?  Disbelief, surely, and some amusement.  I was sent on my merry way, feeling very foolish.  So when I got home I called my future spouse (in tears) and he called his father straightaway.  His father in turn called the Army and they sent someone down in person to straighten this out.  The day after we received a phone call from the Mayor's office with an apology and an assurance that if we needed anything more, we should contact them immediately.

The wedding went off without any further problems.  My father-in-law wore his uniform and I seem to recall that they read off the entire list of his decorations (and it was a really long list).  There was a lot of vigorous hand-shaking at the end of the ceremony and I learned that the formal way to address my father-in-law was "mon général." It was only some time after the wedding that we looked at the Livret de Famille that we received that day and discovered that they had misspelled the name of the city of my birth, Seattle.  It was a minor error (I'm sure that the people at the Courbevoie Mayor's office in the year 1990 probably had never heard of such a place) and we were a bit reluctant to go down there and annoy them again (in spite of the phone call I did not get the impression that we were the staff's favorite people).  So we let it go and said that we would get it fixed eventually.

So here we are 22 years later and, given that I am going to apply for citizenship, now seems like a good time to take care of it.  So I asked about it and the young lady agreed with me that it should be fixed sooner rather then later.  We need to contact the Tribunal de grande instance de Nanterre and she gave us the number.

One step forward and one step back.  I will be glad, however, to finally get it fixed.  As I grow older, it seems almost certain that my final resting place will be here - most likely in a small village in the Limousin.  I'd like to know that both the official French records and the entry on the family tomb will proudly (and correctly) show the place of my birth:  Seattle, Washington, United States of America.