Willfull ignorance is great word smithing.... EB-5 by its nature is pretty dirty - cash for citizenship - you're asking for trouble. Those crooks knew not to ask.Bubba wrote:I think the most likely connection to Leahy and Sanders, as well as the Shumlin administration, is willful ignorance. I suspect the program was creating growth and jobs in the long depressed Northeast Kingdom and nobody wanted to rock the boat so they never asked the questions that were needed to be asked.hillbangin wrote:ski wrote:zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Who gives a f***?
Thanks for posting these Bubba -
Waiting for the digger to connect this to Leahy or Sanders.........
Here’s how EB-5 scams usually go down:
The con men usually promise some new development or large investment project to a community in a targeted economic area. These are, ostensibly, poor, rural zones with high unemployment, but have typically been gerrymandered to include affluent urban areas as well.
While the townspeople are preparing for the influx of capital by making investments in their own businesses, the scammers start soliciting funds from wealthy foreigners by dangling the promise of a guaranteed green card.
As the money rolls in, the scammers line their pockets with investment cash. Meanwhile, vendors don’t get paid, buildings never get built, projects fall apart, people lose their money, and communities end up with only long, drawn-out court investigations to show for it.
This is exactly the sort of thing that happened in Newport, Vt., Port St. Lucie, Fla., and dozens of other cities and towns across the United States (The Center for Immigration Studies maintains a map that outlines dozens of federal, state, local, and civil cases involving EB-5 visa scandals that have rocked towns across the country.)
The lack of oversight of the EB-5 program is not only a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of fraud, it is much more than wasted taxpayer dollars — it also creates potential problems for America’s national security.
“Between ISIS creating the worst refugee crisis since World War II and cyber threats from Russia and China, there’s plenty of justified homeland insecurity,” says Malkin in the episode. “So when we have a government-sponsored money-for-visa strategy without basic oversight that could facilitate terrorist travel, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, or espionage, it’s easy to see why some view the program as a threat to the safety of Americans.”
Some politicians have sounded the alarm about the program’s glaring pitfalls, seeking to investigate and reform it. A March 2016 story at The New York Times highlighted efforts by a bipartisan group of senators to tackle the problems resulting from the federal scheme.
“It’s no secret that the program has long been riddled with corruption and national security vulnerabilities,” Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa (D, 66%) told the Times.
“I don’t believe that America should be selling visas and eventually citizenship,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. (F, 0%) added. “The right to immigrate should not be for sale.”
Other critics see that the only real fix to the troubled EB-5 program is to completely get rid of it, as Canada has already done.
“Once you engage in green-card social engineering, where you go and you take a scarce commodity of citizenship, and you don't make it about a broad American policy … you make it about benefiting special interests,” Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz explains to MMI. “Sure you could try to regulate it, but that in itself breeds corruption.”