6/29/2016, “Hillary would “staple” a green card to STEM masters and PhDs from accredited institutions-–enabling international students who complete degrees in these fields to move to green card status.”…
2019, “If you graduate from a United States University with a skill, upon graduation we should staple a green card behind your diploma.” Charlie Kirk
More “Staple a Green Card:” Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi: “As we said in 2005 and 2006, “Staple a green card.“
10/30/2019, “I was flabbergasted to hear Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk telling students at a university campus lecture last week that “We should staple a green card behind your diploma.” He repeated this nonsense at Ohio State University during a “Culture War” tour stop this week, asserting that any foreign national who graduates from any “four-year college” should get a green card if any “American employer” needs to fill a job.”
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Kirk and his associates “have co-opted [with full support of Jared/Trump, Inc.] a movement they, in fact, had no part building.”
[Image: 8/25/2020, Jared Kushner praises Charlie Kirk while appearing as a guest on Kirk’s radio show (after ads)]
3/13/2020, “The Trouble with Charlie Kirk," Pedro Gonzalez, American Thinker
In an interview with Newsweek last April [2019], Kirk asserted that “he’s been a supporter of Trump’s presidential ambitions since at least 2011.” A few months later, he contradicted himself in an op-ed: “Yes, it’s true, a year before the 2016 election,” he wrote last November [2019], “I was still skeptical that a billionaire from New York City with no real political record was going to be as conservative as some of the other candidates.” The diehard pro-Trump Kirk of 2011 would like a word with the snarky anti-Trump Kirk of 2016.
His go-to response, when called on his contradictions, is some variation of complaining he has been misunderstood, misinterpreted, or “falsely accused.” But can he blame his critics? Even as he beats his chest in the president’s name now, it seems like only yesterday that Kirk was on Fox News, calling Trump “laughable,” mocking him for standing his ground on pro-life issues when pressed during a town hall meeting. Kirk scoffed at a representative of Student’s for Trump who defended Trump on that and other points.
Most importantly, however, is that Kirk’s dishonesty goes beyond fabricating a “MAGA before it was cool” origin story. He is the political used car salesmen of the hour, selling a broken-down neoconservative ride with a new paint job as America First nationalism.
Consider what he wants to sell as “traditional American values.”
During a speaking event on his “Culture War” tour, Kirk was asked, “how long do we have to wait until child drag shows are pushed as American traditional conservatism?“ Indeed, amid the proliferation of LGBTQ ideology, Kirk doesn’t seem to have a problem with warming up to Lady Maga, “America’s conservative drag superstar.” He deferred on that note to his cohost, Rob Smith, a gay man who recently came out as conservative….
Later, Smith accused another man of being closeted for asking how the promotion of heteronormative sexuality helps win the culture war. “You seem to be really interested in gay sex,” said Smith, “I’m pretty sure if you’re into that you can go find somebody to do it with.” Smith reminded America First nationalists that their values — which some might even call traditional America values — are “behind the times” and, as such, “doesn’t really have any place in the conservative movement.”
Kirk sat smiling beside Smith in apparent agreement.
It is on immigration, however, that the paint on Kirk’s heap wears thinnest.
On another tour stop, Kirk smugly condemned a bronze-skinned, black-haired, brown-eyed student wearing an America First hat of harboring a “racist idea” for asking how we can maintain our conservative ideals when immigrants, and the attendant demographic changes, overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party. It is a hallmark of the Left, which Kirk is ostensibly at “war” with, to accuse people of racism for asking tough questions.
Elsewhere, Kirk speculated that there are anywhere between 30 and 40 million people worldwide who “should be given a chance to come to America.“ The idea of importing enough people to populate a second California doesn’t faze Kirk. “Fly from Chicago to Reno and tell me that we’re full,” he said, chastising those
of us reluctant to surrender our spacious skies and amber waves of
grain for smog and urban sprawl. But just in case he didn’t sound
inclusive enough, Kirk also declared his support for “unlimited merit visas.”
America, he insisted, ought to hand out an “unlimited amount of ‘genius’ visas,” and there “should be no limitations on EB-5 visas.”
[Image, 5/7/2017, “A projector screen shows a footage of U.S. President Donald Trump as workers wait for investors at a reception desk during an event promoting EB-5 investment in a Kushner Companies development, at a hotel in Shanghai, China, on Sunday, May 7, 2017.
When the sister of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, promoted
investment in her family’s new skyscraper from a Beijing hotel ballroom
stage earlier in the month, she was pitching a controversial American visa program that’s proven irresistible to tens of thousands of Chinese. (AP Photo)”]
The EB-5 Investor Program is a legalized bribe-for-green-card scam that is rife with fraud, with the added negative of importing a wealthy Chinese elite to America –– people who Kirk called “adversarial” at a recent Florida State University talk. From 2012-2018, around 80 percent of these visas went to people from China, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). “America can benefit from genuine ‘Einstein immigration,'” writes Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of CIS, “the arrival of world-class talents who are at the top of their fields. But there’s not that many people like that, and we currently pretend that many ordinary workers are best-and-brightest immigrants.” An analysis of data from the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies by CIS found that “immigrants with foreign degrees perform substantially worse than U.S. degree holders on tests of literacy, numeracy, and computer operations.”
It’s not uncommon for immigrants with foreign college degrees to have skills that are in reality on par with those of Americans holding a high-school diploma. Nevertheless, this is [Charlie] Kirk’s idea of “merit-based” immigration. To limit or eliminate fundamentally flawed programs like the EB-5 visa, said Kirk, is “one of the most backwards, stupid things we could possibly do.” The Chinese couldn’t agree more.
The pushback against unlimited visas for the “best and brightest,” and millions of more immigrants in general, has since come like a mighty river — from Kirk himself. “I believe in less legal and illegal immigration,” he told Ben Shapiro in an interview recently. But how to square that with his other recent declaration: “I don’t believe that the conservative movement, and some people believe this,” he said, “should become an anti-legal immigration posture.” Evidently, “some people” includes the most recent, anti-legal immigration iteration of Charlie Kirk, for however long that lasts. My guess is not very long.
In his new book, reviewed in Spectator USA, Kirk yearns for the “day when the entire apparatus of the modern welfare state has been turned into private and voluntary services, the United States can afford to let in everyone –– everyone who abides by the rules of the marketplace and pays their own way.” Kirk does not envision a real place that is home to a real people with real culture, but an open-air multicultural bazaar in a territory formerly known as the United States of America.
The idea that America is or ought to be “an economy with a country, not a country with an economy,” is a Cato Institute talking point that would put a smile on the face of the Koch organization, which pays to keep their lights on. Unfortunately for Kirk, America is, as Teddy Roosevelt said, “a nation — not a polyglot boarding house” or a mere marketplace.
Dishonesty and inconsistency wouldn’t be a problem for anyone but Kirk, were it not for the fact that he is a self-declared fixture of the “intellectual foundation” of the America First movement. The real trouble, then, is that Kirk and his associates effectively function as gatekeepers.
They have co-opted [with full support of Jared/Trump, Inc.] a movement they, in fact, had no part building.
Now they’re restraining the America First anti-establishment direction by accommodating what is essentially the status quo on important issues such as immigration, while denouncing dissidents as racists and bigots —the same slurs hurled by the Left.
The policies favored by Kirk are fundamentally flawed, hurt American workers most of all, and fuel support for candidates like Bernie Sanders. It was, after all, the disaffected Middle American, working-class demographic feeling left behind by big business GOP policies that carried Trump to the White House [in 2016].
What Kirk is offering is the same bad deal against which they revolted in 2016.
If America First nationalists intend to put some real miles on this movement, it ought to send the junker Charlie Kirk is trying to sell them back to the scrapyard where it belongs.”
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Added: “Liberals know which politics threatens their hegemony. They don’t care about standard-issue, old-school conservatives: Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney. They can beat those in their sleep. They’re petrified of GOP adopting working-class, anti-imperialism, anti-corporatist politics:” Glenn Greenwald:
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Added:
Above, 5/7/2017, “A projector screen shows a footage of U.S. President Donald Trump as workers wait for investors at a reception desk during an event promoting EB-5 investment in a Kushner Companies development, at a hotel in Shanghai, China, on Sunday, May 7, 2017. When the sister of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, promoted investment in her family’s new skyscraper from a Beijing hotel ballroom stage earlier in the month, she was pitching a controversial American visa program that’s proven irresistible to tens of thousands of Chinese. (AP Photo)”
May 16, 2017, “AP Exclusive: Kushners tap China’s $24B ‘golden visa’ market," AP, Nomaan Merchant, Beijing
When the sister of President Donald Trump’s son-in-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 program 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” programs 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 programs are people like Jenny Liu, a doctoral student in the eastern 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 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.
Despite criticism from Congress, 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.
“It is a growing industry and we do need more oversight,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an expert on the program and a professor at Cornell Law School. “EB-5, when it is done properly, can and does benefit the economy.”
THE LURE OF A GOLDEN VISA
The number of Chinese using investment migration programs worldwide tripled between 2010 and 2015, the AP found among the countries in its survey . In the last decade, Chinese have taken 75 percent of the investor visas issued by the United States, 70 percent for Portugal and 85 percent for Australia. China also remains the top recipient of investor visas in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Spain, Hungary and Malta.
To be sure, those migrating make up only a small fraction of the around 18 million households that could be considered upper-middle-class or wealthier in China, but they echo the laments of many better-educated, urban Chinese.
“Middle-class investors’ choosing to leave shows that their confidence in their future, their dreams and the regime in China is fading,” said Zhang Lifan, an independent political scholar in Beijing.
China’s “golden visa” investors are part of a wave characterized 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.
After decades of economic mismanagement and political upheaval, the ruling Communist Party reversed some of its most destructive policies and unleashed a four-decade-long economic boom in the 1970s. That growth lifted 500 million people out of poverty and vaulted generations of Chinese from peasantry into relatively well-paying manufacturing or service jobs. More than 3 million households in China now have an income of more than $34,000 a year, according to the consultancy McKinsey & Company.
Key to their spending power is China’s real estate boom. Real estate prices in China’s largest cities have more than tripled in the last decade, with prices in Beijing rising by an average of 25 percent a year during that time. Since late 2015 alone, Beijing’s home prices have jumped 63 percent, making a 1,300 square-foot (120 square-meter) apartment worth more than $1 million.
A family that gained ownership of an ordinary apartment more than a decade ago can now sell it for the price of a “golden visa.” And as their dissatisfaction with China’s problems grows, more families are choosing to do so.
Like Liu, many of about a dozen investors or prospective investors interviewed by the AP say they don’t want their children to struggle in China’s rigid and intensely competitive education system, which emphasizes rote learning and can stifle creativity.
Cherry Deng, the mother of a 10-year-old boy in Sichuan province, invested in a port construction project in North Carolina through the U.S. EB-5 program. Deng, who used funds from her car dealership business, said she wants her son to learn from the American emphasis on self-reliance. Deng said she sees Chinese parents supporting their children even after they’ve graduated from college — securing for them homes, jobs and, sometimes, even spouses….
Urban Chinese have also been disgusted by scandals ranging from tainted baby formula to toxic running tracks, and alarmed that even the most prosperous cities are not safe from deadly factory explosions and other man-made disasters.
Despite her success running an online clothing business in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, Peng Jie isn’t confident in her future in China. She sees the prices of property and schools rising and the value of the yuan falling, and fears that success could be taken away.
“In China, we have family and friends, and daily life is convenient,” Peng said. But, she added, “someone in the middle class can become poor in one second.”
WOOING CHINESE INVESTORS
China is central to the success of almost every major investment migration program in the world, so many countries are going out of their way to court Chinese investors….
Agents selling U.S. projects to Chinese take great pains to prove their expertise on the states, the EB-5 program and perceived ties to American leaders. Some marketing materials include photos of Chinese posing with former President Barack Obama.
Now, they’re competing directly against the current president’s relatives.
Meyer, Kushner’s sister, appeared this month at events in Beijing and Shanghai to promote One Journal Square, a New Jersey tower project planned by the Kushner family that would be partially funded through EB-5 investment. The presentation included a photo of Trump and vague promises that the project had “government support” and was “founded by celebrity developers.” The company later apologized for any implication that her brother was supporting the project, and Meyer pulled out of a presentation to Chinese investors scheduled for this past weekend.
Trump’s name already appears on another New Jersey residential tower, Trump Bay Street, built with the help of EB-5 funding. And one month before the November [2016] election, an ad appeared on a Chinese website catering to foreigners seeking a “white American to join our team” for a new project: “A 200 million dollar hotel developed by The Trump Organization in Austin.” A brochure posted online described Trump as the “king of real estate” and included a photo of him giving a speech.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer this month said Kushner would follow government policies on potential conflicts of interest, and that Trump and Congress would review “all the various visa programs and whether or not they are serving the purpose that they were intended to.”
The AP obtained data from officials in 13 countries on how many Chinese have used their investor programs since 2007. To estimate money spent, the AP multiplied the numbers of Chinese investors in each country by the minimum investment required, making the figures an undercount.
The market leader is the United States’ EB-5 program, which gives green cards to anyone who invests $500,000 in a business that creates or saves at least 10 jobs. Several others market themselves as cheaper or quicker alternatives.
Portugal has drawn at least $1.7 billion over four years from Chinese investors willing to buy property to support its faltering real estate market. Spain and Greece offer similar programs. Chinese have bought the most visas in all three countries.
Five Caribbean nations offer passports for as little as $100,000. Chinese are the top buyers in Antigua and Barbuda, according to government statistics.
Australia goes the more expensive route, requiring an investment of 5 million Australian dollars (nearly $3.7 million). Despite a price nearly eight times as high as the EB-5 program, Australia is estimated to have attracted more than $6 billion in Chinese investment in just four years.
But problems in the industry worldwide are rife.
FRAUGHT WITH RISK
The U.S.’s EB-5 program has been heavily criticized by government watchdogs and targeted by lawmakers of both parties in Congress, who say it promotes fraud and helps developers building megaprojects more than struggling communities. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who has introduced legislation to end the program, has called EB-5 a “Ponzi scheme.” Her Republican counterpart, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, has said EB-5 “poses significant national security risks” and “may be facilitating terrorist travel, economic espionage, money laundering and investment fraud.”
Federal investigators said in April [2017] they found that at least three Chinese investors who obtained green cards through the program were fugitives wanted by Beijing. And the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has opened more than a dozen civil cases since 2013 alleging fraud in projects involving around 2,000 investors and more than $1 billion in funds.
Defenders of the EB-5 program say it creates jobs and provides vital funding for projects across the United States, from massive developments in New York to hotels, restaurants and small businesses in the Midwest and on the West Coast….
Canada’s program drew an estimated $2.4 billion through Chinese investors over the past decade, but the national government ended it in 2014, saying that it “significantly undervalued” Canadian residency and created little economic benefit. The province of Quebec has kept in place its separate program, which has drawn at least $1.9 billion from Chinese investment.
And a former Portuguese interior minister and other senior government officials have been on trial since February for corruption, influence-peddling and misconduct in handling “golden visa” applications of investors linked to three Chinese businessmen. Hungary suspended its program selling visas for government bonds earlier this year after opposition parties and watchdogs accused it of corruption.
Ironically, calls to end investment migration programs often end up as marketing tools for the hundreds of agents selling them in China. One agent made note of proposals to change the EB-5 program by saying, “Do not hesitate, and act quickly!”…
If China, which doesn’t recognize dual nationality, can’t keep entrepreneurs and middle-class families from leaving, it risks endangering its economic future. That includes people like Joey, a 30-year-old Beijing resident who works for a major Chinese state-owned conglomerate. He shared his story on the condition that his last name not be used because he hadn’t told his employer of his plans.
Joey and his fiancee have a two-bedroom apartment and plan to get married and have a child in China. Despite their seemingly bright future, they want to raise that child elsewhere. His friends and relatives helped him move enough money offshore to invest in the American EB-5 program.
Joey says he’s seen parents and children struggling to breathe outside in China’s smoggy air, and signs that China’s economy is headed for deeper trouble.
“In China, you have to plan ahead,” Joey said. “You cannot just leave today, whenever you want. You never know what happens next.””
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“Associated Press researchers Liu Zheng and Yu Bing in Beijing and Fu Ting in Shanghai, and reporters Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary, and Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, and data journalist Larry Fenn in New York contributed to this report.”
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