Dollars for US Green Cards get red-lined
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EB-5
For America’s EB-5 green card program, this week has been up-and-down/down-and-up (delete as applicable, depending on how you stand on the vexed question of whether the origin of money should be checked before it is invested in high end property, and whether its owners should be allowed into the country with no questions asked).
The EB-5 program was introduced back in 1990, to award a U.S. Green Card to immigrants who invested in projects that created more than 10 jobs. It was a response to Canada’s Immigrant Investor Program, which was intended to attract wealthy residents of Hong Kong concerned about its then-just-announced handover to Beijing’s control.
Congress renewed the US program year-after-year for decades, and it became increasingly out of date, not least in the fact it remained paper-based, and thus shut out of automated checks for fraudulent applications.