Gilda

It wouldn't help. So long as you're an American citizen, you're legally required to file a federal tax return and pay a Federal income tax on any money earned, regardless of where you live when you earn it.

You do get to take any taxes taken out by your host country's government

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The e-mail seems a political piece designed to hit a bunch of anti-immigration talking points. I doubt that it's actually a letter to the editor of any kind, and I suspect that element of the e-mail is nothing more than an attempt to get in a dig against the "liberal media."

My mother is an immigrant from Ukraine. She speaks Ukrainian and Russian and after 30 years in the United States is still more comfortable in those languages than in English. It's difficult to fully master a second language, particularly one that is from a different language subgroup from any you know and when you begin learning in your late teens. She can speak English fluently--heavily accented and still with some verb tense problems--but is unsure enough of her mastery that she'll revert to Russian when she has the chance. It's a relief to be able to make yourself understood and to be understood without effort and without knowing that you're making obvious mistakes but not knowing what those are unless someone corrects you.

Opportunities to speak Ukrainian are much less common. Running into someone who speaks her native language is like a day at Disneyland, a rare and wonderful treat for her. I know she means no animosity to anyone around her when she has an animated conversation with another person who speaks one of her native languages. She's just happy to be comfortable being who she is and not having to conform to someone else's standards for how she should behave in matters that don't affect them.

She's been an American citizen for 25 years.

My wife has no immigrants in her direct family line. Nobody asked her father's or mother's families if they wanted to be part of the United States. Yet somehow, when she speaks Japanese to another ethnic Japanese, when she celebrates her family's cultural heritage by displaying a flag or other cultural artifacts, this is somehow an "immigration" problem.

Immigrants bring their cultures with them. The city of Chicago has a parade, official recognition, a citywide party, turns the river green, and bases many cultural elements of the microcultures of their city services (police and fire fighters in particular) on that of a foreign culture. More than a century after the last major wave of immigrants from Ireland, elements of Irish culture and Irish cultural identity remain strongly ingrained in the city's cultural identity.

I understand economic and safety arguments. Cultural arguments, especially in a land where culture is the primary export, confuse me. It all seems to me to be coming down, on the cultural front, to a uniformity verses diversity debate. While I think that's perhaps too firmly dichotomous, given that choice, I'm going to favor diversity.

Oh, gee, my signature is actually relevant for once. Very cool.

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I'm against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black, it's a choice, and I support that.

~Steven Colbert