Commonly Misused Foreigner-in-France Terms You Need to Keep Straight
As Americans in France who share the ins and outs of our life abroad online, Jalen and I know that our audience looks to us for reliable information. However, our followers are also tuning in to other content creators who have similar missions. For this reason, there’s nothing that gets under our skin more than coming across inaccurate guidance disguised as trustworthy advice from other foreigners making content about life in France. We believe that if you’re going to claim to have some level of expertise on the topics of immigrating to and living in France, the least you can do is ensure that your advice is factual and precise! In this article, we’re going to outline the top three misused terms that we see online to clear things up for our audience (and to turn our pet peeve into something productive!).
Not everything is a “visa.”
When people who have lived in France for years make content about what “visa” they have or about picking up their “visa” from the préfecture, they instantly lose credibility points – because they likely don’t have a visa at all. A visa is a document you request from outside of France that’s affixed to your passport and allows you to enter the country for a specific purpose with a maximum validity of one year. Unfortunately, “visa” has become a colloquialism that many use to refer to any and every residency document. A better umbrella term would be titre de séjour, or residence permit. Residence permits include visas, cartes de séjour (residence cards), and cartes de résident (resident cards). It’s incredibly important to understand that not every residence permit is a visa, as the procurement processes, terms and conditions, and renewal possibilities of different residence permits vary greatly!
“Working rights” aren’t always clear-cut.
If you see someone state that they’re “working” in France online without explaining any further, don’t assume that anything goes! Plenty of foreigners in France have working rights, but how many hours you can work and what kinds of work you can do all depends on your residence permit. For example, people with student status, job seeker status, salaried worker status, temporary worker status, or spouses of French nationals all have very different rules to follow when it comes to working. We’ve seen far too many creators disseminate advice about how to work in France that’s not only misleading (like making people believe that their student internship is actually a full-time job), but is also against the provisions of their own residence permits (like explaining that they are mixing self-employment and salaried work when they don’t have the right to do so). Don’t follow just anyone’s recommendations about how to work in France if you want to do it right!
“Paying taxes” isn’t all that common.
American content creators in France talk about double taxation every year during tax season. To keep it short, the United States is one of the only countries that taxes based on citizenship versus residency – meaning that income earned by Americans in France is subject to both French and American taxes. However, thanks to something called the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, many Americans in France will only have to file taxes and not pay taxes to the USA. Unless you’re making more than around $100,000 in France per year, you probably owe nothing at all to the US. While there are certainly Americans in France who make that much and more, it’s not exactly the norm to bring in more than four times France’s median salary! While this fact doesn’t stop people from saying they’re “paying taxes” when they’re really “filing taxes,” you can rest assured that most Americans in France aren’t going broke paying double taxes yearly!
Maybe you think that we’re too meticulous when it comes to discussing our experiences as Americans in France, or that our standards for other online content are simply too high, but we maintain that the people deserve information that’s as close to error-free as possible. While these three misused terms are far from the only inaccuracies you’ll find online, we hope this article inspires you to be critical of what you watch and read from foreigners living in France. Have you seen examples of these mistakes on social media? Did you learn something new from this list? Let us know in a comment!
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