[Solved] Treatment of Expats

I found the following post on another forum concerning the treatment of expats in France versus UK expats (my brother lives in France BTW):

"In the U.K , I sometimes feel like expats are treated a bit as traitors, who abandoned their countries and should be deprived of their rights to vote, and send their children back home to be educated etc…

In France, it is the very opposite.
French government highly values and treasures its expats votes.
It makes sure that ,no matter which country we reside in, we can and will always cast our ballot.
It makes sure that we have overseas French representatives and senators in Senate.
It makes sure expat kids will have French schools with French National curriculum to attend to, all over the world and free schooling for the families who can not afford the expensive school fees abroad.
It makes sure that any French passport holder in or out of borders will always be able to enjoy free education in French and considers it a basic right.

The government is conscious that many expats do eventually come back creating businesses and companies and employment and that, many of them, are very innovative , after having learned from many different cultures and learned many languages. They tend to think out of the box and help our country to move forward (We French tend to be quite conservative as a whole).

People do live outside borders for all kinds of reasons that they can not always control.
Family matters, ageing parents, unemployment, promotion for a better career path, will to explore other cultures, Interracial marriages or just to serve their birth country abroad ..

I have read ,here on Buzz, that people can not live abroad and feel love for, or be true to their birth country.

I do not agree, I feel as French as ever, and always have, after 3 decades abroad.
Like many French expats, I do have strong connections to my country and many of us come back home as much as every 8 weeks at times. Or twice a year for many families.
It does not diminish the love and loyalty for the country where we live either most of the time.

But when we do get home, it enables us to see our country with a new pair of eyes.
We can compare our country with others, and appreciate its qualities or deplore its flaws , compared to other nations, as far as education, NHS, civil service, and way of lives are concerned….

The love for a country ,to me, is like the love of a mother for her children, she will never love any less her first two born, because she gave birth to a third one.
Love is unlimited and expandable imo.
You can grow love for the country you live in and be faithful to it and grateful it welcomed you but it does not and will never lessen the love for your birth country imo.

My children are bi cultural and love both of their countries equally and certainly could not choose one over the other, they consider themselves very privileged to have two countries to love and treasure , irrelevant of where they live ( which can vary from one year to the other)..".