The Kushners and their golden visas

They are using White House connections to entice Chinese investors and promising them green cards

The Kushner family has been caught in a shameless act of name-dropping. It has been highlighting its White House connections to entice wealthy Chinese investors and promising them green cards in return under a special government visa program. That’s pretty bad. But it’s also a scandal that Congress allows real estate developers to use the American immigration system to pad their profits.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, is officially no longer managing his family’s businesses, but he still benefits from many of them. His sister Nicole Meyer was in Beijing and Shanghai this past weekend seeking investors for a luxury apartment project her family is developing in Jersey City, a short train ride from downtown Manhattan. Her sales pitch cited her brother and laid out how a $500,000 investment could provide a coveted path to American citizenship. The Kushner Companies later offered a mealy-mouthed apology “if that mention of her brother was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors.”

Ms. Meyer’s disturbing investor pitch was made possible by the EB-5 investor visa, which opens an express lane into the United States for those who can afford to invest nearly 10 times what the median American household earns in a year. The program, which covers business investments as well as real estate, was created in 1990 and took off in the past 10 years as developers figured out how to turn it into a cheap source of capital. Investors are willing to settle for low returns if it means they gain permanent residence status in the United States. Affluent Chinese families seeking a foothold in a stable democracy snap up most of the visas, which are capped at 10,000 a year.

The EB-5 program has been a scandal magnet. The Government Accountability Office and the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security say that immigration officials do not properly vet applications for fraud and illicit sources of money. The real estate industry also games the system by using the dark arts of gerrymandering. Under the program, investors have to put at least $1 million, and it has to lead to creation or preservation of at least 10 permanent, full-time jobs. But the minimum investment drops to $500,000 if applicants invest in rural areas or places with elevated unemployment. Developers working in, say, Midtown Manhattan or Beverly Hills can say that nearby depressed neighborhoods are included in the area when they apply for the program.

Defenders of EB-5 say it fosters investment and creates jobs. But many real estate projects funded through the program, including the Kushner Companies’ One Journal Square development in Jersey City, would almost surely have happenedanyway. Without access to wealthy Chinese families, builders would raise more money from banks, pension funds and other investors by agreeing to pay higher interest rates, which would reduce their profits somewhat.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, introduced a bill in January that would eliminate the EB-5 program. Before Mr. Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security proposed raising the minimum investments for the program, which could be a first step toward reforming it. But it is not clear whether the Trump administration or Congress will make substantial changes since influential real estate groups, including the Kushner and Trump families, benefit from it. Mr. Trump signed a spending bill last week that extended the EB-5 program without any changes through the end of September.

Mr. Trump made restricting immigration, including for refugees fleeing violence, a central plank of his campaign. Yet, he seems O.K. with letting real estate moguls take advantage of a program that sells green cards. In this administration, the interests of the first family and its rich and powerful friends come first.

©2017 The New York Times News Service