Trouble with US expat laws

Americans are taxed based on their citizenship, rather than wehere they live.   this discourages US citizens from moving abroad (and gaining necessary international experience to compete in todays global business environment).    Having to pay twice ...once to the foreign government, and once to the IRS is a regressive law, that should be changed to encourage US citizens to explore business opportunities overseas.

Ethnic towns

Ghetto fabulous

Jun 14th 2007 | LONG BEACH AND LOS ANGELES

From The Economist print edition

Making a buck out of Little Ethiopia and Cambodia Town

“CAMBODIAN,” says Richer San, waving his arm towards a car-repair shop. Driving down Anaheim Street, he eagerly points out other businesses owned by his countrymen. “Cambodian; Cambodian; Vietnamese landlord, Cambodian business; all Cambodian. And we're trying to buy that one.” As a tourist magnet, the mile-long string of cafés and strip malls hardly rivals, say, San Francisco's Chinatown. But that may change. Mr San and others are negotiating with the city of Long Beach, east of Los Angeles, to create America's first Cambodia Town.

If they succeed, it will join a fast-growing club. Before 2000 there were four signposted ethnic enclaves in and around Los Angeles: Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown and Little Saigon in Orange County. Since then a Little Armenia has appeared, together with a Thai Town, a Historic Filipinotown, a Little Ethiopia and a second Saigon Town. Other cities are following. Last week San Jose, in northern California, was considering a Vietnamese business district.

Immigration is one reason for the explosion of ethnic enclaves. The Asian population of Los Angeles and Orange counties grew by 15% between 2000 and 2005, to 1.7m. A bigger reason is marketing. Local officials have long seen such places as a cheap way of luring tourists. More recently, many have been influenced by Richard Florida, a sociologist who argues that young, educated workers are attracted to tolerant melting-pots. Celebrate your immigrants and gays, the thinking goes, and your city might become the new Silicon Valley.

Even as cities tout their ghettos, though, the ghettos are emptying. Charles Zhang, a demographer, points out that the Chinese and Vietnamese are leaving traditional inner-city enclaves and forming new clusters in the suburbs. California's Koreans are spreading out, too: less than a quarter now live in Los Angeles. Newer immigrants are likely to follow the same path. Well-to-do Cambodians are already drifting away from urban Long Beach in search of cheaper houses and better schools in the suburbs. Mr San recently joined them.

Indeed, California is now such an ethnic mish-mash that it is hard to tell where one enclave ends and another begins. Los Angeles's Armenian and Thai residents had to agree to share a section of Hollywood Boulevard. In 2004 a group of Indian businessmen in Artesia, a small suburb, tried to label their shopping district “Little India”. They failed. Artesia contains fewer Indians than whites, Mexicans, Chinese or Filipinos.