tax-free immigrants?

Factual Questions
1

My paranoid fundamentalist father-in-law was spouting something about that immigrants to the US that open their own business, do not have to pay taxes for 7 years. When I asked him where he heard this, he said it was common knowledge, and continued to ramble on about “white America…blah blah blah.”

Anyone ever hear of this? I love shooting down his reactionary rantings.

Thanks

2

Snopes has already dismissed this rather hairbrained rumour.

Of course, I doubt it’ll make a damned bit of difference to the truly illogic-determined.

3

What’s funny about this stupid rumor - which, by the way, has its own form in every single country in the Western world - isn’t just the racist stupidity of it. It’s the stupidity of thinking the government would let ANYONE get away with not paying tax. Har!

4

Ah, the SDMB at its absolute best. Fighting true ignorance. Good luck with your pops-in-law, Sass.

5

I asked a quite similar question not too long ago … check out Visual Purple’s post near the end of the thread.

6

Thanks all for the links/info.

It must be tough to live in a world where: UN troopers are moving to US bases, black helicopter patrol the skies of the Midwest, secret government labs invent AIDS, Satan controls the media and 99% of scientists and the Earth is only 6000 years old.

7

That may be logical for most countries, especially for places like the US, where illegal immigration is a big problem, and even legal immigration has strict rules and limits.

But think about it for a moment: If your government wanted to encourage immigration, wouldn’t tax exemptions be a part of your plan?

One such country is Israel, which grants new immigrants many privileges in order to induce them to immigrate. Among them are “tax credit points” which are used to lower the income tax due on however much one is earning. These are gradually phased out over a few years as the new immigrant becomes a not-so-new immigrant. See for example, this site, particularly the lines labeled “1 1/2 years”, “2 1/2 years” and “3 1/2 years” (and note that the Hebrew word “oleh” (plural: “olim”) means “immigrant(s)”.)