[ikut3hva]

Definitely, I had a good awareness of the language barrier from the day I arrived.

To be fair, I have continued learning German—not because I want to pass the B1 examination and obtain permanent residence, but because I feel my children need to be protected and guided, and I want to teach them the same things they learn at school. Every moment I spend learning the language is a moment I invest out of love, so that I can be a better and more supportive parent.

[jitix]

Then why are you complaining about the language requirement for permanent residency? You knew the tradeoffs and chose them willingly, enjoy your income, invest in your home country and move back once you retire.

Simply making higher-than-median income should not make you eligible for permanent residency. Cultural immersion and assimilation is important to maintain social stability and language is just the first step. From what I found (and as another commenter pointed out) the bar is not even that high.

Edit: For context I am not a right winger and am an immigrant myself. But I am seeing the social fabric of my host country (Canada) degrade because of immigrants' refusal to assimilate.

[blks]

Why do you want people with foreign backgrounds to “assimilate”? If you were to move to France, are you going to abandon your own language, culture, and play-pretend to be a Frenchman?

If you live somewhere long enough, know the country, work and handle daily life without issues, have social connections with other people in this society, understand at least some language - in my opinion you are as integrated in that country as needed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why do you want people with foreign backgrounds to “assimilate”?

It’s a healthy, human process that forces weighing what works and what doesn’t across cultures and, hopefully, walking away with something better than either individually. The idea that immigrants shouldn’t have to assimilate is arrogance redressed.

[pessimizer]

You're making it sound like the desire to be a Frenchman is an unreasonable requirement for becoming a Frenchman.

> abandon your own language, culture

Thank god nobody is asking this. They're being asked to learn enough French to participate in France. B1 is hard, but it ain't B2, and you'll still barely understand what's going on around you.

[freehorse]

> requirement for becoming a Frenchman

The discussion is about permanent residence, not citizenship.

Permanent residence allows eg an employee be able to continue staying in a country without being dependent on a particular employer and having to reapply everytime they change jobs. It is gives a person who works in a country for a certain amount of time already, paying taxes etc, having the same rights as an employee.

[s1artibartfast]

If someone wants to be a permanent resident of a country and build their life there, they should have to plan to eventually become a citizen of that country.

To allow otherwise leads to its destruction, just people with no long term skin in the game extracting before moving on.

It is a huge conflict of interest among the population. Its like having a corporation where half the owners want a quick return and exist and half want to run it like a lifestyle company.

[earthdeity]

Extraction is a weird way to put it. Usually, immigrants, especially skilled workers, are overwhelmingly net contributors. That's part of why modern economies want them so badly.

It's actually the perfect opposite, a skilled worker who plans to leave is a burden on their home country as they presumably will use services there they never paid for. Hopefully, in developed nations this balances out more or less. In undeveloped nations there's not much of a system to take advantage of.

I live in a country I was not born in, I pay taxes as much as anyone else and pay into social security programs I'll likely never get to use. The state did not have to spend a penny to educate me. If I return to my home country without having worked there another day in my life, I'm probably quite the net loss to them.

The extraction phase of your life is overwhelmingly being a child or elderly.

[freehorse]

The main difference is citizen rights like voting for government, flexibility over regaining residence when leaving the country for some time, and how potential kids get the citizenship (depends on country). But otherwise I do not see how there is conflict of interest, in most other respects in the places I know permanent residents have the same rights and imposed to the same rules as citizens (social benefits, health, pension etc). In the corporation case, it is like some having shares with voting rights and shares without. In some ways, (permanent) residence and citizenship are orthogonal, because you can have citizenship in a country, but not be a resident there because they live abroad, and then they do not have certain resident rights like public healthcare.

Getting citizenship is a different thing, and in some places much harder, easier to get denied if you have the wrong ethnicity etc. I think that when settling long term in a place, having equality wrt work, health, social rights as native citizens is important, and thus getting permanent residence in a country should not depend on irrelevant factors. The important thing is to not have people who live long term but their residence rights are tied to their current employer. In these situations, the system produces a workforce that is pressured to be much more compliant and accept stuff that citizens and permanent residents typically don't. This is the kind of difference that creates people with different interests within a country. Stuff like cultural assimilation and similar mentioned here in comments should be irrelevant imo for solving issues like this, and frankly, it presupposes already a certain dynamic and as if the local culture is on homogeneous thing, which is often not. A country don't accept economic migrants (at scale) as some kind of philanthropy, but to fulfill needs/jobs within the country. If they need people to work, they should expect those who stay long term to be given rights equivalent to citizens wrt work etc.

[imtringued]

You have to choose one way or another.

Either you argue that the job requires you to stay in another country and the stay is always temporary and there you would not focus on any given language since you're going to leave before you reach any level of proficiency

or you want to stay in the country because you like it and therefore learn the language.

You cannot cherry pick the option where you have your cake and eat it too.

It is illogical to demand permanent residency for a temporary stay that is short enough to not bother learning the language.

[Dylan16807]

This argument makes sense if learning the language is the default and you require an excuse to get out of it. But I don't think that's true. If you don't want to learn, that's not a big deal. There's no cherry picking involved. Learning the language isn't inherently tied to working somewhere. It's tied to citizenship but this isn't citizenship.

In other words, yes it's illogical to argue that a stay is short and long at the same time but who declared that learning the language is an inherent part of long stays?

[blks]

Parent comment called for “assimilation”. Assimilation implies replacing your own culture with another, like by Webster definition.

[suddenlybananas]

As someone who is an immigrant to France, I do think you have an obligation to assimilate as much as possible.

[blks]

So how the “assimilation” looks like to you? If you ever have kids, are you going to be speaking French only with them? Do you try to catch up with vast cultural background that people experience since childhood in France? Do you plan to change your name to sometime more French-sounding?

[jitix]

It depends on your goal. If you want to just work, pay taxes and save money and move back after retirement then maintain your home culture all you want. But don’t complain about PR then. Especially on the basis of how much money you make.

But if you want “permanent” residency then yes you have to be a bit of a “pretend-Frenchman” or however you want to put it. I just pointed out that tradeoff in the GP comment.

The biggest hypocrisy is that you will never be considered a real Chinese/Japanese/Indian/Vietnamese even if you learn their languages and adopt all their cultural traits. Western countries are very generous about this but you do have to meet them half way. B1 level proficiency is not even that high of a bar - compare that to living in China.