I have found Ezine Articles to be way out front. Submit good articles and they will get approved. I think you only need 10 to become Platinum and be approved in 48 hours Squidoo was very good a few years ago but now it's value is minimal - when did you last see a Squidoo on the first page of Google ? You will see plenty from Ezine Articles
For me, articlesbase.com, amazines.com, and goarticles.com are some of the easy-to-approve article submissions sites I'm using right now.
Why do they get deleted? Are they over promotional? Or do people delete them through spite? I started using Hubpages. It's not that hard to get a score above 75, and thus get links, but apparently your hub score goes down if you don't use the site enough. That means that you'll lose your backlinks if you stop using them. So I've therefore stopped placing new articles onto it.