News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Dec. 19, 2014: Whoever said ‘money doesn’t’ bring you happiness’ certainly was most likely never an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S. or poor!
A recent New York Times article of Dec. 13th drove home this point plainly. While some 11.5 million undocumented immigrants, who have been living in the U.S. for more than five years, been paying taxes despite getting no social services or qualifying for any benefits and contributing to the economy of this country by working long hours doing many jobs American citizens would not do for the menial wages, they still remain with little chance at getting legal status in the U.S. They remain in the shadows in limbo, with little hope.
The five million or so, including the high skilled workers who may qualify under President Obama’s executive order, will simply get temporary status and a temporary reprieve from the U.S. ICE men who cometh in the night and wee hours of the morning.
Unless of course the U.S. Republican controlled Congress decides to “swallow hard” like Mitt Romney suggests, and offer some kind of path to legal status to them and the other 6.5 million in desperate need of relief.
Contrast that with the global rich spotlighted in the Times article.
They simple get a “V.I.P. visa” by paying at least $500,000. The U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services’ ‘EB-5 Immigrant Investor’ visa lets rich foreigners who are willing to invest US$500,000 or up in a project in a rural or high-unemployment area that creates or preserves at least 10 jobs, get a green card and eventual citizenship. Simple and cut and dry as that!
This visa is in such high demand that for the first time since it was launched in 1990, it hit its cap of 10,000 visas this year, the Times reported.
Yet as the article points out: “V.I.P. visas amount to selling citizenship to the rich without bringing many broader benefits to the host country.”
But this is the last kind of immigration reform we hear about when it should be the many aging rules that are changed pronto. In 2014, this investment minimum should be raised dramatically in order to ensure we are attracting the right investors and investments and not simply selling US birthright to anyone seeking another citizenship option to hide their assets away from their dictatorial governments.
No Republicans are running around talking about this and President Obama, heaven forbid, did not see the need to raise this price point through executive action even though the Times insists “the program has come under fire for failed projects and lack of oversight.”
And so again the rich wins and keep on getting richer while the skilled and the poor are out of luck. Instead, they are told to get in line? What line and where? No one knows.
But well-heeled foreigners do – they simply though their high paid attorneys, industry experts on EB-5 and a few good friends whose projects they plunk down some money into – leap to the front of the line! As for the the poor, hard working undocumented immigrants – well too bad for them – they are left hung out to dry yet again or well – picking fruit and cleaning up after the very rich EB- investors!.
The writer is CMO of Hard Beat Communications, which owns the brands News Americas Now, CaribPR Wire and Invest Caribbean Now.
