Situated on the outskirts of Sacramento is California’s largest master-planned community, McClellan Park. It has homes, offices, restaurants, a hotel and even a 2-mile-long runway that serves jets. But 30 years ago, the location was a starkly different story: an Air Force base that had just been shuttered, costing 11,600 jobs.
Fundamental to this remarkable transformation was a federal program that incentivizes investment — and stimulates job creation — throughout the United States. That program, the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, still exists today. And amid uncertainty across the economy and in the financial markets, Republicans and Democrats alike should come together to support the program’s expansion.
EB-5 was created by Congress in 1990 to attract capital investment from foreign investors. It’s more than met that objective, with a track record of attracting billions of foreign direct investment and creating millions of new U.S. jobs — all at no cost to Americans taxpayers. The program actually helps reduce the federal deficit.
In exchange for bringing capital to the United States (with the minimum amount of roughly $1 million, and less if the investment is in a rural or high-unemployment area) and creating jobs (at least 10), 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, and today it’s one of Amazon’s eight air hubs in the United States — but the only one in California. The Amazon hub operates 20-22 hours per day and employs thousands.
Contrary to what some believe, fraud has never run rampant through the program. An investigation of pending applications in 2021 found that fewer than 1 percent of them were fraudulent or a threat to national security, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.
But in March 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley was the architect of legislation to tighten the integrity of the EB-5. The legislation ensures that all elements of the program are in compliance with U.S. immigration law, helps prevent fraud and provides tools to investigate it when it’s suspected. Along these lines, federal officials investigate the backgrounds of the investors and the source of an immigrant’s investment capital to ensure it came from lawful sources and through lawful means.
Since the Grassley legislation became law in 2022, there’s been a gusher of EB-5 capital entering the United States from abroad. Nearly $5 billion of EB-5 capital has been spread across more than 25 states, with much of the money going toward projects in rural and high-unemployment areas. It has generated billions of dollars in follow-on investment and 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’s 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 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?
There are 70 other countries that 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 — starting businesses, employing Americans and paying 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 paying down the deficit at the same time. What’s not to like about that?
President Donald 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. And if they come and help invent a cure for cancer, or start the next Google, they enrich the whole world.
Trump is right that the EB-5 program and making gold cards a reality are smart programs that put America first.
