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Comment by Ovid | Hacker News Reader

Actually, no. The US has tax treaties with roughly 1/3rd of the countries in the world (source: https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/International-Businesses/Unit...). If you're not in one of those countries, too bad.

Further, these tax treaties differ from country to country and don't always offer the same protections. Here, read the 42 page US/France tax treaty (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-trty/france.pdf) and try to figure out how you'd be impacted if you were living in France.

We expats don't just have to hire accountants to do our taxes, we often have to hire international tax lawyers, EVEN IF WE DON'T EARN ENOUGH TO PAY US TAXES!

Studies have repeatedly shown that the majority of expats are abroad to find a job, to teach, to volunteer, or for love. We're taxi drivers, waiters, English teachers, farmers, computer programmers, and so on. We're normal people who are being massively screwed by rhetoric in the US.

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> We're normal people who are being massively screwed by rhetoric in the US.

Yup. Same goes for normal people who move the other way. The anti-foreign(er) consensus in the US political system/debate is almost as bad as the "tough on crime" madness.

And of course that's reflected in what people think. I remember being in a discussion after an interesting EE380 session (so not exactly bottom of the pile) and one of the guys started ranting about the evils of H1Bs driving down wages. I mentioned I was on an H1B and that what he said was illegal. He asked me how much I made, I asked him to guess. He mentioned a number. I said "multiply by at least 3". He kind of shut up after that...

>I mentioned I was on an H1B and that what he said was illegal

The problem is that some companies break the law by playing around with job descriptions and job duties. There are people who aren't against immigration but who are against the H1B visas.

But the problem there is companies breaking the law, not the H1B visas, the people or the companies that use them legally.

And of course the knee-jerk reaction is to make the laws even more draconian than they already are, when a significant portion of the problems are caused by the very draconian nature of the current laws (and non-enforcement against companies that flout them).

That's only one type of tax treaty. There are also Totalization Agreements. Quoting https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Tota... :

> The United States has entered into agreements, called Totalization Agreements, with several nations for the purpose of avoiding double taxation of income with respect to social security taxes. These agreements must be taken into account when determining whether any alien is subject to the U.S. Social Security/Medicare tax, or whether any U.S. citizen or resident alien is subject to the social security taxes of a foreign country.

You'll notice that's a much smaller list of counties.

(When I went to the local Swedish tax office to request a copy of the declaration that I needed to include in my US tax forms, to say I was covered under the Totalization Agreement, they didn't know at first what I was talking about. Asking for the form also must have triggered something, because a month or so later I got a phone call from the Swedish tax office asking for why I needed that information, and asking for a copy of my most recent US tax forms.)

As an expat myself I always had the ability to get these services from my employer, in some cases I have even insisted that this will be part of the employment contract just like any relocation package.

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