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Land of milk and honey


PaulT
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''Brits who go to foreign countries of their choosing to live are expats.''

Wrong.

Brits who go to foreign countries of their choosing to live and work, with the avowed intention of returning to Britain eventually are expats.

Brits who go to foreign countries of their choosing to live for the rest of their days are immigrants.

Those Brits who retire to France with the intention of seeing out their days in France are deluding themselves by calling themselves expats. Those of us who were expats prior to retirement ( 25 years in Africa & the Middle East ) refer to their terminology with amusement and a degree of contempt.

We are Immigrants, nothing more, nothing less, even though the French do not (necessarily) call us immigrants.
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[quote user="powerdesal"]We are Immigrants, nothing more, nothing less, even though the French do not (necessarily) call us immigrants.[/quote]

Well said and spot on but the mentality of them is that they don't feel or see it that way.

The only, strictly speaking, error is that whilst the UK and France stay as members we are infact migrants which is exactly the same as those 'immigrants' from outher EU countries arriving in the UK are. Very few Brits I meet who live in here seem to see themselves that way whilst I have always considered myself the immigrant or migrant.

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Strange isn't it, I always called myself une etrangere in France. I once called my self that to my conseiller at the bank and he assured me I was not, 'I', apparently was 'une anglaise', and that is quite different.

I never moved to France permanently anyway, I knew I would leave eventually.

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It is interesting..whilst there are quite a few French people who only consider the Arabs and the North Africans to be 'immigrants ' in the negative sense of the word.. I think this is changing.. When you have enclaves of Brits who socialise together, speak little French and don't appear to work then it is easy for everyone to be tarred with the same brush. I have heard this group saying they left UK because their were too many immigrants, being completely unaware of the irony in that statement.
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[quote user="lindal1000"]It is interesting..whilst there are quite a few French people who only consider the Arabs and the North Africans to be 'immigrants ' in the negative sense of the word.. I think this is changing.. When you have enclaves of Brits who socialise together, speak little French and don't appear to work then it is easy for everyone to be tarred with the same brush. I have heard this group saying they left UK because their were too many immigrants, being completely unaware of the irony in that statement.[/quote]

Absolutly spot on. I was quite shocked when a friend of mine voted FN. I asked him why and he said because of the immigrants.  pointed out that I was an immigrant to which he said I was different. I said that he meant it was because I was not black at which point he looked at the ground and said yes.

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Here we go again.

The French Interior  Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, has suggested that UK policemen should be drafted into Calais to help with the illegals problem as well as telling the illegals that the UK is not a land of milk and honey. (my expression).

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[quote user="lindal1000"]It is interesting..whilst there are quite a few French people who only consider the Arabs and the North Africans to be 'immigrants ' in the negative sense of the word.. I think this is changing.. When you have enclaves of Brits who socialise together, speak little French and don't appear to work then it is easy for everyone to be tarred with the same brush. I have heard this group saying they left UK because their were too many immigrants, being completely unaware of the irony in that statement.[/quote] And they get together in "expat groups", of course.....
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