Americanexpatinfrance's Blog

This is taken from Expatica. Excerpts:

The increasing popularity of halal products is largely due to young descendants of Arab and African migrants, who want to enjoy the same culinary diversity as their non-Muslim French neighbours.Halal foie gras, non-alcoholic champagne, sauerkaut garnished with pork-free sausages: Muslim-friendly food is moving away from its immigrant roots and merging with mainstream French tradition.

While the fine wine and gourmet food exports that underpin the French food industry have been hit hard by the global crisis, the halal niche market has been growing fast.The boom went largely unnoticed until a hamburger chain tried a halal menu in some of its restaurants, sparking charges of communautarisme — a term roughly meaning “ghettoisation”, which grates against the French insistence on integration.

The growth of halal products is largely thanks to young descendants of Arab and African migrants, who want to enjoy the same culinary diversity as their non-Muslim French neighbours while remaining true to their cultural roots.

“It’s mostly driven by the second and third generations,” said Antoine Bonnel, director of the Paris Halal trade show held in early April.
“It’s not a case of the Muslim community withdrawing into itself, but rather one of integration, since they want to be able to buy halal sauerkraut or spring rolls,” he said.

Bonnel was referring to the increasing number of Muslims joining the French middle classes and expanding their culinary horizons, a trend that has even spawned a new term — beurgeois, a slightly ironic mix of bourgeois, or middle class, and beur, slang for North African.French sales of halal food are forecast to hit EUR 5.5 billion in 2010 and move “from the ethnic market to the mass market”, said Bonnel.

The word halal (lawful in Arabic) applies to food that has been prepared according to the prescriptions of the Koran.Islamic law requires meat to be slaughtered under religious supervision and forbids the consumption of pork and alcohol.The halal market, targeting France’s estimated five-million-strong Muslim population, has obvious attractions for retailers and restaurateurs, and market researchers say it is growing rapidly….

From Expatica.com below, but you can follow news in French here on Figaro.

French driving veil row escalates

A political row over the case of a French woman fined for driving in an Islamic veil gathered pace Sunday as a leading Muslim scholar and a French far-right leader both weighed in.
With the government planning to ban the full Islamic veil in public, the fining of the French woman in Nantes took a political turn when a minister threatened to punish her Muslim husband for offences including polygamy.
The woman has challenged the fine as a breach of her human rights.
Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University, said that the move by French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux to punish the woman’s husband “betrays the values of France”.
“To be polygamous is illegal… that is the law that says that. But since when has a minister been able to say that they will take away his nationality?” Ramadan told around 1,000 people at a conference the Arrhama mosque in Nantes.
Hortefeux had written to Immigration Minister Eric Besson asking him to look into allegations the woman’s husband may belong to a radical group and may be a polygamist with four wives and 12 children and guilty of welfare fraud. He said the man could be stripped of his French nationality if they proved true.

Swiss-born Ramadan, who had a Bush-era visa ban lifted by the United States earlier this year, hailed the Muslim community of Nantes for refusing to react to “provocation” over the issue.
Mourad Sandi, an official at the Arrhama mosque, said the affair had been given too much attention in the media. “I am not sure the subject merits our discussing it, we do not want to add fuel to the fire,” he said.
But the collective of Nantes mosques said in a statement that they were “worried by this systematic stigmatisation which goes against the values of the Republic”.
The association “considers that the stopping of a driver is a judicial procedure and is angry at how such an event has been turned into being all about Islam.”

Meanwhile French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen told local media it was “scandalous” that the man’s alleged wives were receiving family benefits and said the potential stripping of the man’s French citizenship was “normal”…

Brian Friedman of Totally Expat published this piece on managing expatriate employee costs. Excerpts are below (click on the link for more details, as there are 21 different items discussed):

We all know that expats are expensive and that a significant proportion of assignments fail – but what can be done to manage costs and to maximise the overall return on investment? And in these straitened economic times, we all know that expatriate costs are increasingly under the microscope……. Prioritise. Too many companies try to cut expatriate costs by reducing headcount in the International HR department or by forcing vendors into unsustainable price reductions. The reality however is that it is not internal headcount or vendor fees that make assignees expensive. In fact research undertaken by the Forum for Expatriate Management suggests that in-house costs typically amount to just 1-2%of total assignment costs and external costs amount to no more than 8-10%. The big costs are Assignment Allowances (35%), Property Costs (35%) and Relocation Costs (15%). So if you are looking to control expatriate costs, concentrate on the big ticket items – don’t rush to slash headcount….