Kushner Companies Seen Hawking Shady U.S. Visa Buying Residency Program to Wealthy Chinese, by Michael Krieger.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. – Frédéric Bastiat
I’ve written about the EB-5 visa program previously, something I consider a total racket that allows wealthy foreigners to buy their way into U.S. residency while funding real estate catering to, you guessed it, wealthy Americans. It’s more or less a system by which really rich people abuse a government program simply to help out other really rich people. What a country. …
The Kushner Companies have been taking advantage of this program for years, and continue to do so despite Donald Trump being the current U.S. President. …
Like so much else in this fake economy, the EB-5 visa program is an unethical racket that uses a government program originally designed to help struggling communities to further help the already wealthy by funneling cheap financing to luxury property development. It’s just another example of how screwed up our incentives are as a nation, and how completely corrupt the American Banana Republic has become.
In a Beijing ballroom, Kushner family pushes $500,000 ‘investor visa’ to wealthy Chinese, by Emily Rauhala.
The Kushner family came to the United States as refugees, worked hard and made it big — and if you invest in Kushner properties, so can you.
That was the message delivered Saturday by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s sister Nicole Kushner Meyer to a ballroom full of wealthy Chinese investors in Beijing.
Over several hours of slide shows and presentations, representatives from the Kushner family business urged Chinese citizens gathered at a Ritz-Carlton hotel to consider investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a New Jersey luxury apartment complex that would help them secure what’s known as an investor visa.
The potential investors were advised to invest sooner rather than later in case visa rules change under the Trump administration. “Invest early, and you will invest under the old rules,” one speaker said. …
While Kushner has reported divesting from elements of the family business, including the specific project that his sister pitched in Beijing, the session Saturday demonstrated that the company is perceived as enjoying close ties to the Trump administration. Ethics laws prohibit government officials from profiting personally from their public-sector work.
Watchdogs and ethics experts on Saturday criticized the Beijing event as an attempt to cash in on Kushner’s newfound proximity to power.
“It’s incredibly stupid and highly inappropriate,” said Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer in President George W. Bush’s administration, who has become a vocal critic of the Trump administration. “They clearly imply that the Kushners are going to make sure you get your visa. … They’re [Chinese applicants] not going to take a chance. Of course they’re going to want to invest.”
Same old swamp. Nepotism. Pity.
