Fabien Leharge spoke very well on France’s TV5 about the injustices of the implementation of the American FATCA law in France, and how it discriminates in particular against French citizens who happen to have been born in the USA but who didn’t stay their long enough really to consider themselves Americans. But now their own country of France is treating them as foreigners.
Featured in this segment is the story of Diego Cesari who was about to buy a house in France. But because of his USA birthplace, no bank in France would lend him the money until he could prove that he had made it right with the IRS. A few months after his birth in California, his family left the USA definitively. His memory of the USA is based on a few photos and a birth certificate. Near the end of the interview he says, “I have no ties with USA. I mean listen to my accent–I would say that I have really assimilated a good French rather than an ‘American’.”
This is embarrassing for both the governments of France and the United States. When will these human rights abuses end?
