I don’t know if this is a regional stereotype, springing forth from some backwoods community… But I hear it a lot.
“Those A-Rabs get to have their liquor store, seven years tax-free. As soon as their seven years are up, they sell it to a cousin so that he can get another seven tax-free years!”
I live in Michigan, and there are a lot of Arabs. A town near me, Dearborn, is 30% Arabic. The further away from Dearborn you get, there are fewer Arabs and many more Mexicans.
Arabs own a lot of party stores (or liquor stores as I hear the Real World calls them). A lot of them that I’ve talked to are actually Chaldean. That’s besides the point.
Why do MOST white people I meet (here, not online in this vast world of superior intellect) seem to fullheartedly believe that Arabs dont pay taxes.
they may be talking about tax abatements/breaks that are given to new businesses in order to encourage economic growth. that probably registers in their minds ad “no taxes!” and thus the meme starts.
This is Michigan we’re talking about - they’re quite generous with tax benefits in the crapola areas of the state, so in fact they may not have to pay taxes like everyone else.
the zones aren’t necessarily all large brownfield developments - the first one i saw in detroit said something along the lines of it being a zone with commercial businesses and residences.
also, the zones are just one part of it. there are probably many business incentives for investors with money. and probably the only ones willing to invest in these areas are the immigrants that make up large minority chunks of the population.
Most immigrant “tax free this and that” urban legend stuff is nonsense, but the extent the rumor exists it may come from the reality that many immigrant convenience store owners (at least in MD) are incredibly dilatory and evasive in paying the state sales tax they owe. It’s not uncommon for the sales tax arrears to get to hundreds of thousands of dollars for individual stores.
The whole idea behind tax relief programs are that they are for people willing to open up businesses in underserved or “undesireable” areas.
We have a similar complaint in Chicago that those “A-rabs” open up stores in black neighborhoods and overcharge everyone. Now I don’t know if they get tax breaks, but there certainly is a lot of grant money for people willing to open businesses in poor Chicago neighborhoods.
There’s also a huge amount of risk to it. From robberies to protection money to gangs and all sorts of things. This is WHY there are few businesses in those areas.
What happens is people take the money open stores and as they become sucessful sell out and move to a better neighborhood. This is nothing knew, especially among immigrants. In Chicago, Milwaukee Avenue (Chicago’s great 2nd shopping street), since the time the street was named, immigrants have been founding businesses on it. As the business got better they closed up and moved further northwest up Milwaukee Avenue. (Milwaukee is a diagonal street that runs NW).
The closed up shop is then released to another set of incoming immigrants and the cycle started over.