Their money goes toward 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 U.S., federal regulators have linked the EB-5 visa program to fraud cases involving more than $1 billion in investment in the last four years.
Trump signed a spending bill that included a renewal of the program through September, although federal authorities have proposed more than doubling the minimum investment. Just one day later, Kushner’s sister, Nicole Meyer, was in Beijing courting Chinese for a new project funded by EB-5. That’s raised complaints about conflicts of interest and new calls to revise or even end the program.
