France tries to reserve its brain drain.

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
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FRENCH Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has launched a desperate bid to stem France’s brain drain, which has seen hundreds of thousands of its brightest citizens leave for the UK.

De Villepin has announced 40 modest measures designed to make it easier for French expatriates to return, as well as for foreign businessmen and researchers to work in France.

For the past half-decade, French high-flyers have been voting with their feet and moving to London in search of better career prospects.

According to the French embassy in London, there are now an estimated 300,000 French residents in Britain – matching the number of Britons estimated by French authorities to live in France. The number of French voters registered at the London embassy has soared from 60,000 in 2002 to 103,000 today, and embassy extrapolations based on other contacts by French citizens for administrative formalities suggest the total French population in Britain is three times that number. Some analysts believe it is much higher.

About 42,000 French executives are now believed to work in Britain, exceeding the 39,000 British executives in France, the embassy said.

In an effort to ensure the brain-drain doesn’t become permanent, De Villepin has ordered the creation of a single contact point for returning French executives to simplify tax and other procedures, and the introduction of tax relief on their top-up pension contributions.

But he is also introducing a swathe of low-cost measures to make it easier for foreign businessmen to work in France. The complexity of obtaining the French Carte de Séjour or visa is legendary and newly qualified foreign students in France are sent home as soon as they graduate.

The Carte de Commerçant, a work permit required for bosses born outside the European Union, is being scrapped. Entrepreneurs and executives moving to France will be offered a single, English-speaking contact to process all bureaucratic formalities. That is intended to end the tedious chase to assemble documents, and accompanying authorised translations, that has bedevilled the lives of foreign executives in France for decades.

Other measures are designed to encourage promising students from abroad to study in France, rather than head for English or American universities. French Lycées in London, New York and elsewhere will offer preparatory courses for the élite French Grandes Écoles, while French universities and management schools will be encouraged to offer more courses conducted in English.

The national research agency will make more funds available to attract foreign students to study for masters’ degrees in France, and student recruiting missions will be dispatched to the US, India and Brazil.

And instead of obliging foreign post-graduates to get the next flight home because their visa expires when their course ends, they will be allowed a six-month extension in which to find jobs in French firms, or set up a business of their own.



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aeon

Council Member
Jan 17, 2006
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Well send a letter to Tony blair, aka the "Turbanator", tell him, to make his best, that all brightest french people leave for UK, then ask him to tell M16 to hire some Fake french terrorist link to alquada, to make a terror attack in uk or USA, and then you guys will have an excuse to nuke france,invades them , and steal all their wine.