President-Elect Trump has said that he is not anti-immigration (his wife is foreign born, she will be our first foreign born first lady). He is anti-illegal immigration. He is also against legal immigration that displaces American workers, such as the H1-B program. As a policy, he should love EB-5. It does the opposite of what he thinks H1-B’s problem is; EB-5 creates jobs for US workers and exactly the kind of lower middle class jobs held by so many of the people that elected him.
President-Elect Trump built his business on real-estate deals. I believe some current projects even use EB-5 capital. He should be intimately familiar with how beneficial EB-5 capital is to the real estate projects that consume the majority of EB-5 capital.
Even if he has never heard of EB-5, he likes ‘a good deal’. EB-5 capital is as good as it gets when it comes to bringing in foreign direct investment without costing the taxpayer a dime or sacrificing any jobs. His investment plan for rebuilding American infrastructure calls for private investment capital to supplement taxpayer capital. Every dollar of EB-5 capital for both infrastructure and private enterprise investment frees up a private domestic investment dollar for his plans. EB-5 is simply more money in the system without any sacrifice.
EB-5 needs reform to ensure that there are no national security or market (fraud) vulnerabilities associated with the program. None of this is controversial and is consistent with the President Elect’s stated goals. I sincerely hope that President-Elect Trump sees EB-5 for what it is and how it can be the crown-jewel of a Trump administration’s immigration policy that helps rebuild America.
About The Author
Matt Gordon is a noted policy expert in the visa-based investments field and is an authority on structuring visa-based investments. Mr. Gordon’s career spans business operations, finance and law. He is the editor of the EB-5 Book, the legal treatise on the EB-5 program and a frequent lecturer to immigration attorneys. Mr. Gordon has participated in policy events, including those hosted by the White House and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Prior to founding E3iG, Mr. Gordon was an investment banker for a decade and ran the US division of a Swiss multi-national corporation. Mr. Gordon is a licensed attorney, having practiced mergers and acquisitions law at the beginning of his career with the largest and most reputable Wall Street firms including Fried Frank and Sullivan & Cromwell. Mr. Gordon received his B.S. in Policy Analysis from Cornell University and his J.D., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.