OPINION:
California’s largest master-planned community, McClellan Park, is situated on the outskirts of Sacramento. It has homes, offices, restaurants, a hotel and even a 2-mile-long runway that serves jets. Thirty years ago, the location was starkly different. It was a recently shuttered Air Force base, which triggered the loss of 11,600 jobs.
Fundamental to this remarkable transformation was a federal program that incentivized investment and stimulated job creation throughout the United States. That program, the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, still exists. Amid economic and financial market uncertainty, Republicans and Democrats should come together to support the program’s expansion.
EB-5 was created by Congress in 1990 to attract capital from foreign investors. It has more than met that objective, with a track record of attracting billions of dollars in foreign direct investment and creating millions of U.S. jobs, all at no cost to American taxpayers. The program helps reduce the federal deficit.
In exchange for bringing capital to the United States — a minimum of roughly $1 million and less if the investment is in a rural or high-unemployment area — and creating at least 10 jobs, EB-5 investors can get one of the most prized commodities anywhere in the world: an American green card.
McClellan Park is just one of many EB-5 success stories. The program was also critical to the transformation of Norton Air Force Base, which closed in 1994. The base became San Bernardino International Airport. Today, it is one of Amazon’s eight air hubs in the United States, but the only one in California. The Amazon hub operates 20 to 22 hours daily and employs thousands.
Contrary to what some believe, fraud has never run rampant through the program. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, an investigation of pending applications in 2021 found that less than 1% were fraudulent or a threat to national security.
In March 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley was the architect of legislation to tighten the integrity of the EB-5. The legislation ensures that all program elements comply with U.S. immigration law, helps prevent fraud and provides tools to investigate it when fraud is suspected. Along these lines, federal officials investigate the investors’ backgrounds and the source of an immigrant’s investment capital to ensure it comes from lawful sources and through lawful means.
Since the Grassley legislation became law in 2022, a gusher of EB-5 capital has entered the United States from abroad. Nearly $5 billion of EB-5 capital has been spread across more than 25 states. Much of the money goes toward projects in rural and high-unemployment areas. It has generated billions of dollars in follow-on investment and has created more than 233,000 jobs in urban high-unemployment areas and more than 194,000 rural jobs.
One impactful rural example is the Big River Steel plant in Osceola, Arkansas. The project is the largest private investment in Arkansas’ history and one of the most technologically advanced scrap recycling steel production facilities in the world. The catalytic impact of this plant alone has produced more than $7 billion in follow-on manufacturing assets and thousands of high-paying jobs in this historically distressed Mississippi Delta Region — again, at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer.
The Trump administration has proposed a smart complement to the EB-5 program, colloquially known as the Gold Card. Immigrants could purchase the right to U.S. permanent residence in exchange for a $5 million contribution to the U.S. Treasury. Do the math: If we allow in 10,000 a year, we raise $500 billion over a decade.
Has there ever been a better way to soak the rich?
Seventy other countries offer permanent residency or citizenship in exchange for investments or contributions.
The EB-5 program and the Gold Card are synergistic. Both will contribute to deficit reduction and the strength of the American economy. Talented entrepreneurs will flock to the United States and start businesses, employ Americans and pay taxes.
Companies will also have an opportunity to purchase Gold Cards to allocate to people they want to hire. Doing so would strengthen the American economy by making our businesses more dynamic and decreasing the deficit. What’s not to like about that?
President Trump can take a long-overdue step to boost the EB-5 program’s potential by issuing an executive order that stops counting spouses and children of investors against the annual visa allocation. They were never supposed to be included in the visa totals, and this change could triple EB-5’s capacity.
Some complain that this program allows millionaires and billionaires to “buy their way past the Statue of Liberty.”
Wrong. It’s just a smart way to put America first. We can still take the normal immigrant flow — family and work-based visas — and bring in the rich and exceptionally talented.
Given the reduction in U.S. birth rates and the aging of our society, we need talented immigrants now more than ever. They don’t take jobs; they create them. If they come and help invent a cure for cancer or start the next Google, they enrich the whole world.
Mr. Trump is correct that the EB-5 program and making Gold Cards a reality are smart programs that put America first.
• Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and co-author of “The Trump Economic Miracle.
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