Government’s EB-5 Program Offers Foreign Investors Green Cards for Job Creation

Wall Street Journal, November 2007, By Miriam Jordan

'The U.S. program lately has become popular among investors from South Korea, China, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia desperate to bypass the uncertainty and years-long wait to gain residency through traditional means. Helping fuel the new interest are immigration attorneys and others aggressively marketing the program abroad.

“The opportunity is truly beautiful to individuals who want to live and contribute their energy in the United States,” says Morrie Berez, chief of the EB-5 program at the immigration agency. “And it creates economic growth and especially jobs for Americans.” The job-creation aspect of the program appears to have neutralized criticism from anti-immigration activists.'

'Yong Nan Park invested in a South Dakota dairy farm, enabling her to immigrate to California with her family. South Dakota, one of the first states to tap into the program in 2004, credits the immigrant-investor scheme with reviving its dairy industry and starting a new meat-packing sector. The state had been trying to attract foreign investment in its dairy industry before it discovered the EB-5 program. It got regional-center qualification for a swath of 45 contiguous counties in the eastern part of the state. In two years, the program has helped fund new dairy farms worth $90 million and beef-processing plants valued at $52 million, state officials say.

“Suddenly we have extra capital to accelerate development and help South Dakota farmers who want to go large-scale but lack capital,” says Joop Bollen, who oversees the state’s program, which has attracted European and Asian investors.