Welcoming Tech Talent from Around the World to France

I live and work in France and I am well versed in this type of Visa. It&#x27;s a very nice arrangement, but it&#x27;s still France. It&#x27;s still dealing with the same administrative burdens for everything else. You don&#x27;t get treated special, you just have a special deal. I&#x27;ve said before that if France wants to attract foreign talent what they need to do is assign someone in the French administration to help workers get established. That is <i>the</i> hard part about coming to work in France. If you&#x27;ve dealt with the DMV in the US, imagine that for everything. You can&#x27;t just walk into a bank and open an account. You can make an appointment for next week...which is your first consultation. You&#x27;ll need to bring a long of documentation for your second appointment the week after. You won&#x27;t get your bank card for awhile, and by the way you&#x27;ll have to activate it before you can use it. That might take a week. You&#x27;ll need to go to Paris for a medical check that you can do your job. All French employees must do this. And you have to do it every two years. Pee in a cup. Undress over there. You&#x27;ll need to go to the prefecture to get your residence permit. It took me 5 months to get my initial appointment and a total of 9 months to get my card, even though the &quot;long term visa&quot; in your passport is only good for 3 months. Some people I know waited 2.5 years for their residence card, another over a year. More? The French healthcare system is pretty good, but you won&#x27;t get on it until after several trips to the Social Security office. Whoops, your entire file was sent back to you because they needed some additional piece of documentation they didn&#x27;t tell you about. Make another appointment. Repeat. Repeat. Drivers license? If you are 1 of 14 states you can exhcange easily, but you only have 1 year to do that, after which you have to go to driving school. 3000 euros. Better learn French to pass the test. Better learn French to navigate all the adminstration. So Year 1 you will not be productive. You will be running around trying to stay legally. For an entire year. Ask me how I know.

It looks great on paper but the devil will be in the detail and how well they execute on the admin&#x2F;bureaucracy side.<p>If my experience a few years ago with the auto entrepreneur scheme and URSAFF are anything to go by, you&#x27;ll need a lot of patience, the ability to speak half decent French and a sense of humour if you want to avoid ripping all your hair out :)<p>I love France (have even married one of their citizens!) but this is a country where in 2013 we moved from one department to another and had to close our bank accounts with the branches in the first department and open new ones in the second department because there was no way to migrate accounts between branches of the same bank o_O We literally had to post cheques to a friend in the old department so he could deposit them while we waited for the old accounts to be closed and new ones opened (complete with different cards, chequebooks, account numbers - the works).<p>Why did we need to migrate accounts? Because you could only deposit cheques in the same department as your local branch. Why were we depositing cheques?! Because half of France (including my fiancées&#x27; employer at the time) still uses them for everything (which is also great fun if you&#x27;re in a rush in Super-U and the person in front decides to pay with one).<p>Having said all of that, France is awesome despite its flaws and there are lots of reasons to be hopeful with Macron now piloting the ship.

This seems sort of like the kind of visa system the USA would advertise to attract a particular talented group, does it not? The founder visa looks quite friendly and easy, but it&#x27;s four years. What happens after that? And what if the startup fails, does the founder have to leave France?<p>I also wonder how appealing these international visa programs will be in light of the changing US immigration and visa system. Will the USA lose out on talent? Will the USA lose on half of the next generation of billion dollar+ startups? Assuming the past trend mentioned in WSJ persists, anyway<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.wsj.com&#x2F;digits&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;study-immigrants-founded-51-of-u-s-billion-dollar-startups&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.wsj.com&#x2F;digits&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;study-immigrants-fou...</a>

Here is a country that refused to give me knowledge when i needed it but it&#x27;s now trying to lure me in.<p>A decade back i finished my high school in a French speaking country with honors and got an admission in a French university to study Business Administration. I&#x27;ve been refused the entry visa for some imaginary reasons. Unofficially i was part of the group of potential foreign students who may refuse to go back to their home-country after graduation. I then stayed in my country went to university to get a &quot;useless&quot; B.A. that couldn&#x27;t help me to face the socio-economic realities of the world. In 2015 i read a book &quot;Googled&quot; by Ken Auletta that shacked me to the core and pushed me to learn how to code. I&#x27;m now a self taught programmer with skills that will benefit any French Tech startup and products&#x27; projects that could create 1000s of jobs in France if i decide to start my companies there. That said, I would not go to France because it didn&#x27;t welcome me when i wanted to get in order to acquire knowledge. Now France &quot;needs&quot; me to come and boost their shrinking economy with the tech-knowledge i have acquired elsewhere. Sorry Monsieur le President, I ain&#x27;t coming.

I&#x27;ve been working on relocating to France, and while I&#x27;m very excited to do it it&#x27;s been frustrating to try to get information about this program. People don&#x27;t seem to know what documentation is required, and replies come after weeks (if ever) from government bodies.

Wow you have to have a graduate degree to even be an eligible employee, never mind.

If they&#x27;re looking to attract founders, founders will obviously care about exits. It might not be the #1 concern, but it&#x27;s up there. France has a reputation for very high taxes and a seeming contempt for very large cash windfalls. I&#x27;d be curious how they plan to improve this international image.

They&#x27;re requiring masters degrees for entrepreneur visas. One thing Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lei Jun, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Travis Kalanic and Cheng Wei all have in common is a lack of a master&#x27;s degree.<p>Why would France add a restriction to their visa that would have eliminated the founders of Amazon, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Xiaomi, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Uber and Didi Chuxing?<p>Are they pinning all their hopes on someone following the path of Larry Page or Robin Li, except choosing to immigrate to France to start their search engine? Are the people who made the rule just not aware how few of the top tech company founders have master&#x27;s degrees? Is it some kind of intentional low-beta strategy to try to scoop up a bunch of more certain, smaller wins?<p>I truly don&#x27;t understand what kind of reasoning went into to this program. It&#x27;s just making France look out of touch.<p>Edit: ok apparently the founder needs money and it&#x27;s employees who all need masters degrees (nearly as bad).

I&#x27;ve been looking forward to more details about this program emerging seeing that I&#x27;m a french-speaking francophile who recently made a transition to a career in programming.<p>The minimum education requirement being a Master&#x27;s degree is quite disappointing. I fear they are making the same mistake as Japan when the latter introduced their points-based immigration system that requires you to be fluent in Japanese with a Master&#x27;s degree and published research, making far above the salary any Japanese worker would make in the same position.<p>France isn&#x27;t exactly an easy country to immigrate to. I was toying with the idea of doing a Master&#x27;s earlier this year; this might be the motivation I need to get it done now.

It will be interesting to see how French engineers and computer scientists see this type of visa. The perhaps equivalent H1B visa in the US is or was obviously a big plus in certain areas but was lately perceived as an abuse channel to get cheap labour to replace the locals. Hopefully this scheme won&#x27;t be abused...

For those who are seriously considering moving to a European nation for work purposes, you might want to also look up the EU blue card scheme[1] which is most likely more flexible than this for employees (no idea of equivalent for founders and investors).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blue_Card_(European_Union)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blue_Card_(European_Union)</a>

<i>There has been a very strong dynamic over the past few years around France’s 10,000 startups.</i><p>Any info on the success rate?

Will they pay as good as the Us? That is going to be the biggest motivator in my opinion.

Very French for them to require a masters degree for employees. Contrast that to the more welcoming working permit in Germany[1]. Also currently the startup scene in Berlin looks pretty interesting!<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluecard-eu.de&#x2F;eu-blue-card-germany&#x2F;work-permit.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluecard-eu.de&#x2F;eu-blue-card-germany&#x2F;work-permit.h...</a>

As some here have posted disparaging comments about French bureaucracy, I&#x27;d like to share my own experience. I&#x27;ve have emigrated to France four years ago with my wife and our two kids. On the whole our experience dealing with the government has been quite positive.<p>Yes, some stuff feels really backwards, like getting a bank account (it helps a lot if you have a big wad of cash to dangle in front of your banker, you&#x27;ll get treated differently), the RSI (social security for entrepreneurs) and the CAF (child support) are frustratingly incompetent, but most bureaucrats we dealt with have been quite understanding to our needs and some of them have really gone out of their way to help us.<p>I think it really depends who you stumble upon, and most of all - if you make an effort to speak French (which is definitely one of the hardest things about emigrating to France) you&#x27;ll find that in the end it all works out, it just might take some time!

So Euro 300K for 4 years. It doesn&#x27;t look like good deal compare to USD 1 million for permanent residency.

No mention of self-employed&#x2F;freelancers&#x2F;consultants.

At this point it seems that many Europe nations are more &quot;free&quot; than the US. Now with same-sex marriage getting legal in germany the probably last big issue is resolved. You will not get extreme high salaries like in the US, but there is stuff like free higher education and getting serious medical care won&#x27;t be expensive at all.<p>Also remember that the EU has a higher population than the US with very diverse countries to explore just a few hours apart, all rich of culture and stuff that is over thousand years old.<p>Oh, and of course we don&#x27;t have Trump. :D

From reading the comments there seems to be huge potential for a startup in France: Making it easy to navigate the bureaucracy. Automate everything, streamline communications, speed up enquiries, etc<p>This is assuming that the bureaucracy cannot be disrupted itself outside of the government. I imagine if such a startup would work it would have lots of popular support. Uber for Bureaucracy.

I guess if I&#x27;d want to attract talent, I would not use the most depressing, gray, bland picture of Paris I could find...

I wonder if there are any avenues to do this as a sole proprietor? I&#x27;m an unattached programmer with a bunch of independent projects released and in the works, but I&#x27;m not really interested in doing a full-on &quot;startup&quot;. Currently looking into DAFT, but I think France is a bit closer to my heart!

Does it have to be a graduate degree in something related to the job or would like an MA in Art History do the trick?

Four years renewable is nice, but the higher tiers of &quot;international tech talent&quot; <i>employees</i> are usually eligible for a <i>permanent residence permit</i> in Germany.<p>Does France have anything to compete with that, other than better food?

This basically seems like an H1-B in the US. The US has had H1-B for 25 years now and is doing 100,000+ per year.<p>This seems like too little too late.

France needs to lower long term capital gains tax. If you work for 10 years at big risk, the payoff should be big.

I see a blank page.

Just a friendly reminder: as of today there has been a state of emergency in France for over a year now. We are talking about situation with regular army with full automatic assault weapons on the streets and police authorized to enter apartments without court order.

This on some case could be good, but there&#x27;s plenty of people with talent and they don&#x27;t want to hire them or nor give them decent salary.<p>This is what ruin the French, only following trend. USA is doing TECH DAYS, let&#x27;s do the same.