Our "First Son-in-Law" has his little hands in this game, too.<p>> the Kushners' company held an event at a ritzy hotel in Beijing to encourage Chinese investments for a development project in New Jersey.<p>> "Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States," read a brochure at the event...<p>> A spokesperson for Kushner Companies later apologized for the poor optics, but just two months later, CNN reported that the business was again invoking Kushner's status as a senior White House aide to attract investors.<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sec-launches-probe-into-kushner-companies-for-use-of-eb-5-visa-program-2018-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/sec-launches-probe-into-kush...</a>
> But Canada closed its federal programme in 2014 (some provincial schemes, such as Quebec’s, continue).<p>Only mentioned as an aside, but for Vancouverites, this has been very painful.<p>Uniquely Quebec manages its own immigration (let's not get into it) and they have an investor immigration scheme that essentially sells citizenship for a pittance. Of course since persons have freedom of movement there's nothing stopping persons who buy citizenship in Quebec for moving to Vancouver, which almost all of them do.<p>Accordingly while British Columbia has enacted various foreign investor taxes to try to limit the distortions from foreign money on the real estate market, there remain significant impacts of foreign wealth in Vancouver and BC.<p>Sadly federal politicians aren't in much of a rush to annoy the Quebec government by playing hardball on this issue as Canada has an election coming up and Quebec has heaps of seats in play.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think the $500k investment is a great idea. Why is it in our interest for that money to be invested elsewhere?<p>I also think we should staple green-cards to the back of people who receive higher-education degrees in the united states.<p>Unfortunately our immigration system rewards the rule-breakers and encourages people to lie. Like many things in life, the honest people get hosed.
Peter Thiel wrote about it back in 2014 in his book, Zero to One.<p>We have a different image of China and China has done a great job posing as next superpower but the reality is very different on the ground.<p>Rich Chinese want to get away from China by paying whatever price they can afford, this is not surprising at all!
As is usual in cases like these, NOLA had their number.<p><a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/30/chinas-louisiana-purchase-new-orleans-own-battle-of-algiers.html" rel="nofollow">http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/30/chinas-louis...</a><p>I remain profoundly ashamed that Al Jazeera rather than an American or local news outlet had to break this story.
It is large industry.
More than one of my acquaintances got their green card and then citizenship by paying $20-$30k for fake marriage to a US citizen.
This has always been a common theme in Asia/South East Asia and is nothing new.<p>The biggest barriers are:<p>1. Money/Income
2. Language.
3. Education.<p>You can't fit in if you don't know the language, or literate. That's what makes Student visas so valuable, because it can give an anchor to an family to move abroad.<p>Education, you can't survive abroad w/o income and this is usually hand in hand w/ a degree.<p>Money, well, money is good everywhere.
Our son used to go to a HS in the east bay where foreign nationals would pay residents of the high school to essentially adopt their kid so they could enroll, take every AP and Honors class possible, and get into a UC campus.<p>It’s crazy. We actually hated the public schools and moved away.
And so are US birth hotels. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-raid-l-maternity-hotel-birth-tourists-n315996" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-raid-l-maternity-h...</a>
The dumb thing is how cheap these go for. If you had to pay 500k for a passport it would make sense.<p>Investing 500k costs very little. You'll likely make more money than if you bought Chinese real estate. Even if you have to borrow 500k its only going to cost you ~10-20k a year.
Aside: A lot of comments here mention various methods of paying for various citizenships. Most of them seem somewhat derisive about these pay for a passport schemes, so to speak.<p>But, hold up, isn't this a move in the right direction? Sure, it's all 'rich' people that can do this right now, but having people from lots of different countries moving about, having 'table stakes' in many countries, and generally putting cash into these places, that seems to be a 'good' thing to me. Sure, yeah, it could be a lot better for even us proles. But the world being such a place where these 'schemes' can happen at all seems like it's a good thing.
An interesting related incident regarding the role of EB-5 in the financing of Hudson Yards was a top HN post[1] not too long ago.<p>> Manhattan’s new luxury mega-project was partially bankrolled by an investor visa program called EB-5, which was meant to help poverty-stricken areas<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644880" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644880</a>
The reasons for this are obvious:<p>1. Money laundering i.e. How can Chinese government officials embezzle tax money and keep it? Buy real estate overseas and have your family live in them.<p>2. Tax evasion. Buy real estate overseas and have your family live in them.<p>The education angle makes sense, but imo it's not the main reason.
One solution to this is to improve the visa situations for Chinese nationals. If it weren’t such a pain to travel to western countries with a chinese passport there may be less demand for these foreign residency schemes.