Sunday 29 November 2015

I call it potato, you call it potarto, etc as the song goes.

Val says we English speakers know to call the  displaced people arriving refugees not migrants. The French take is different and our French friends tend to call them migrants in the initial stages. Florence who is lead French oraniser sent us this. Asile by the way is asking for asylum.

 A little french vocabulary lesson…
In France you are called a ‘migrant’ because you still didn’t do any ‘demande d’asile’.
If you ask ‘l’asile’, then you become a ‘demandeur d’asile’
If you receive a positive answer to your ‘demande d’asile’, then you become a refugee (réfugié) with papers to stay in france for 10 years if I remember
well, and then you are treated as any other french people.
If you receive a negative answer, you become a ‘débouté du droit d’asile’, and then you can try to have a ‘recours’, or leave the country, or live here
without any papers and fear to be caught and be reconducted at the frontier at any moment.
But if you started your ‘demande d’asile’ in another country, then you cannot continue in France, you’ve got to come back to that country…
Hope I’m clear,  that’s not really easy, and after those few global explanations, much more complex in reality.
Sweet dreams !
flo

 Rachel Samash then followed up with more info.
Just to add that as far as I can gather from internet research refugee is a ‘faux ami’ that is to say that in English it doesn’t mean the same as in French. In English refugee means( as far as my research tells me)  “a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster”. This means that a person is a refugee EVEN if they haven’t asked for asylum (Different to the French meaning). The United Nations defination is the same as the English and not the same as the French which certainly confused me as I had assumed the French definition would follow the UN.
The Bristish tend to avoid using the word ‘migrant’ for people  leaving their country to escape war and say ‘refugee’  because although they are migrants it also includes a much larger group of people,  ‘a  migrant is a person that travels to a different country or place, often in order to find work’,  and can lead to  people misjudging the  people at,  for example Calais, thinking they are just looking for better jobs. The woolly area is when people move country because there is war in their country but in another part  so they are anticipating danger rather than being forced to leave.
Please do correct me if any of you think I have misunderstood the terms,

I was personally struggling with the french term migrant, and so kept calling them refugees when i was talking French and was stubbornly ignoring the french who corrected me because  it felt ‘politically incorrect’ but now I realise it is just another  ‘faux ami’.
Posted by at