Word: frenches
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Like his father before him, French publisher, author and political commentator Eric Naulleau was born into a military family assigned to a temporary foreign posting. But because his birth happened abroad, where his father - himself born in Lebanon to a French army father - was serving France's national interests, Naulleau has had to wage a long and surreal battle with the government to prove that he's actually a French citizen. Naulleau is just one of a growing number of French people born outside France or in the country to foreign parents who are now being told they must present...
...that with the increasingly strict obligation to prove your citizenship, you can walk into a state administration today to have your ID or passport renewed, and walk out virtually a stateless person," says Naulleau, 48, whose family had been posted to Baden-Baden, Germany - about 30 miles from the French border - when he was born in 1961. "The situation is creating a two-class system of citizenship in which French nationals born abroad or to foreign parents are treated as inferior, and forced to prove their worthiness of being French more than others." (See pictures of Bastille Day celebrations...
...this happening? For years, applicants for new passports and ID cards relied on their expiring documents to prove their identities and French nationality. But in the mid-1990s, the country started strengthening the verification requirements on suspicions that significant numbers of foreigners had made bogus claims of citizenship to obtain French passports. In the past few years, the rules have become even more stringent. According to the Justice Ministry, about 18,000 people, or 12% of all those who tried to renew their passports or ID cards, were rebuffed in 2007 because they didn't have irrefutable proof of nationality...
...Authorities say they are merely making necessary updates to the nationality verification process - not an illogical move, they note, in a world where terrorism and identity theft has become more commonplace. Perhaps, detractors say, but those French citizens born overseas or in France to foreign-born parents are facing a trial that their peers are not. While the latter group can often rely on the French state to check official records to prove their citizenship, people born in former French colonies to naturalized immigrant parents or to French families abroad are being subjected to a paper chase that often leads...
...Concern has reached such a level that the French media are now sounding alarm bells. The daily Libération, for instance, ran a story on the issue Monday under the headline: "The French People That France Rejects." Some reports have detailed the incredible lengths that these "rejects" have had to go through to obtain the required certificates of nationality for themselves, their parents and, at times, their grandparents...