South Dakota - No illegal immigrants, just tax dodgers, welcome

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Fox Dakota News Now , April 14, 2021

PIERRE, S.D. (KOTA) - As an influx of immigrants make their way to America’s southern border, Governor Kristi Noem says that she does not intend for South Dakota to accept them.

However, that decision is ultimately not hers.

“The state, governor, cities, counties... Nobody has any authority over federal immigration law,” said Taneeza Islam, Executive Director for South Dakota Voices for Peace. “These children, when they come to South Dakota, they aren’t part of any agency. They are staying with people they presumably have a relationship with, and are vetted through the Health and Human Services office of refugee settlement.”

Islam also called the Governor’s tweets “un-American, racist, and heartless.”


Former President Donald Trump issued an executive order allowing states and cities to refuse to accept refugees. Current President Joe Biden struck down that order in February.

The announcement comes in light of the Biden administration asking states to volunteer to house displaced migrant children. However, Noem’s office said that they had not been asked directly by the administration to do so yet.

From October 2020 to February 2021, only 20 unaccompanied minors came to South Dakota. Islam says that although Voice for Peace has not seen a notable increase in the number of immigrants coming to South Dakota since the beginning of the Biden presidency, they have not ruled it out as a possibility either.

“We are expecting a surge of young children who are at our border right now to make their way up to South Dakota,” Islam said. “(And) Probably see our numbers increase.”

Immigration advocates say that immigrants play an important role in South Dakota’s economy. Namely in its two biggest industries, agriculture and tourism.

“If we learned anything through the pandemic, immigrants and refugees are essential workers in our economy,” said Islam.

Noem’s office said that their “policy” would not extend to immigrants who came to the country legally, and that they would be welcoming to those who came to the state by those means.

Noem previously committed to accepting refugees into the state under President Trump. She defended the departure from that policy as being due to more lax immigration policies under President Biden.

Governor Noem is the third Governor in the region to commit to not taking in immigrants who come to the country illegally, after Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts and Iowa’s Kim Reynolds. Experts speculate that the controversial style of Noem’s announcement is part of a broader appeal to a national audience.

“She is one of those people who is being talked about as a potential presidential candidate, or at the very least, someone who is trying to position herself as having a strong hand in choosing the nominee for president in 2024,” said South Dakota State University Political Science Professor David Wiltse. “I think what we are seeing is mostly political positioning, political posturing.”


AxiosAm Oct.6,2021


South Dakota has become the world's foremost tax haven — right up there with the Cayman Islands, and ahead of old-fashioned locations like Switzerland, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.

That's one of the clear messages from the Pandora Papers leak of confidential financial information about the world's richest individuals.

Why it matters: The hundreds of billions of dollars sequestered in South Dakota trusts generate no taxes and are effectively off-limits to anybody who might have a legitimate claim on them.

How it works: Like most tax havens, South Dakota has no income tax, no inheritance tax and no capital gains tax. But the state has gone even further than that. South Dakota allows for extreme secrecy when law enforcement comes knocking, and protects assets from being claimed by creditors, ex-spouses, or pretty much anybody else.

By setting up a trust, the "settlor" — think some billionaire wanting to keep his assets secure — gives those assets to a trustee in South Dakota to look after. The trustee then invests the assets for a "beneficiary" who is often a direct relative of the settlor. Neither the settlor nor the beneficiary ever needs to set foot in South Dakota, or even be able to find it on a map.
All three parties — the settlor, the trustee and the beneficiary — can legally claim that the money isn't theirs.

How it happened: South Dakota started carving out its position as the most laissez-faire state for financial services in 1981, when it abolished upper limits for credit-card interest rates.

In 1983, South Dakota became the first state to allow perpetual trusts — money that can remain untouchable for centuries, with no one ever paying inheritance tax on it.

Since then, South Dakota has continued to pass laws making its trusts more attractive to the world's ultra-wealthy. It allowed trusts where the settlor and beneficiary can be the same person. It has also sealed all court documents setting up trusts, making it impossible to know — in the absence of Pandora Papers-style leaks — who might have one.

Who's in: Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, Chinese real estate billionaire Sun Hongbin, and dozens of other high-profile tax optimizers — both foreigners and Americans —are sheltering their assets in South Dakota.

By the numbers: A decade ago, South Dakotan trust companies held $57 billion in assets. The current figure is about $360 billion — with similar trusts in other states bringing the total for the U.S. close to $1 trillion.

The bottom line: “South Dakota offers the best privacy and asset protection laws in the country, and possibly in the world," tax expert Harvey Bezozi told the Guardian.