France's Young Leave to Go to England For Jobs

The Times On Line reports on France:

THIS Wednesday Marine Fretel, an intelligent, well-educated young French woman, will board a train to London. She has let her Paris flat, packed a large suitcase and said goodbye to family and friends.

She does not expect to return. Fretel is one of the “Eurostar generation” of French professionals fleeing to London and other cities abroad in the hope of better careers in a land of opportunity.

The farewell parties held each week in Paris are multiplying, and although the government puts a brave face on the exodus, this rush for the exit is an embarrassing symptom of chronic French woes as the country prepares to pick its new president.

A dearth of jobs in France, the world’s fifth largest economy, has turned London, less than three hours from Paris by Eurostar, into an eldorado for young professionals such as Fretel. Friends in London have told her that the British capital, unlike the one she is leaving behind, is a “city of dreams”.

“In France everything is stagnating, all doors are closed; in London, though, they say all possibilities are open,” said Fretel, a fluent English speaker who is planning to stay with a cousin in Kentish Town until she finds the job of her dreams, preferably in the recording industry, of which she has experience.

Socialism means high costs and decline.