Chinese spent $24B on US, other ‘golden visas’
beijing — When the sister of President Donald Trump’s sonin-law Jared Kushner promoted investment in her family’s new skyscraper from a Beijing hotel ballroom stage earlier this month, she was pitching a controversial American visa programme that’s proven irresistible to tens of thousands of Chinese.
More than 100,000 Chinese have poured at least $24 billion in the last decade into “golden visa” programmes across the world that offer residence in exchange for investment, an Associated Press analysis has found. Nowhere is Chinese demand greater than in the United States, which has taken in at least $7.7 billion and issued more than 40,000 visas to Chinese investors and their families in the past decade, the AP found.
The Chinese investors flocking to these programmes are people like Jenny Liu, a doctoral student in the coastal city of Nanjing, who sold her apartment two years ago and moved in with her parents. She used the money from the sale to invest $500,000 in a hotel project in the United States. If the project creates enough jobs in two years, she’ll get a prized “green card” and a pathway for a less stressful education for her 9-year-old son.
“My son has a lot of homework to do every day, but I don’t think he has learned a lot from school,” Liu said. “I hope he can actually pick up some useful knowledge or skills rather than only learn how to pass tests.”
The flood of investors reflects how China’s rise has catapulted tens of millions of families into the middle class. But at the same time, it shows how these families are increasingly becoming restless as cities remain choked by smog, home prices multiply and schools impose ever-greater pressure on children. They also feel insecure about being able to protect their property and savings. Their money goes towards government bonds, businesses, mountain ski resorts, new schools and real estate projects, including a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey built by the Kushner Companies, once run by Jared Kushner, now a White House senior adviser. But the industry is murky, loosely regulated and sometimes fraud-ridden — in the US, federal regulators have linked the EB-5 visa programme to fraud cases involving more than $1 billion in investment in the last four years.
The EB-5 programme and many others like it market heavily in China.
China’s “golden visa” investors are part of a wave characterised not by poverty, persecution or war, but by people with steady jobs and homes who are pursuing happiness that’s eluded them in their homeland.