The Bo Xilai Affair and EB-5 Demand in China

In the six weeks or so since I last returned from Shanghai, another 2-3 would-be EB-5 Regional Center projects have assured me that they “have most if not all Chinese EB-5 investors in place and ready to fund.”  Sometimes delivered with the charming innocence of youthful ignorance, other times conveyed with arrogance by misguided snake-oil salesman, the sheer historical inaccuracy of the notion that you can “pre-sell” EB-5 in China is the number one reason so many otherwise sophisticated U.S. developers are being separated from their money right here in America.   But th…

Heady Days for EB5 Attorneys

There are but a handful of US immigration attorneys who truly grasp the EB-5 visa at a molecular level. It’s a short list of perhaps a half dozen veteran practitioners, and I am without a doubt at the very bottom of it (if I’m in it at all!) Having spent 15 years as the industry’s EB-5 “Prophet of Doom” instead of quietly working to improve this powerful visa category as my colleagues were doing put me at a chronological disadvantage which I seem to finally be conquering via a combination of sheer immersion and a rapidly evolving policy by USCIS.What appeared at the time as my Nostradamus–like warnings (anybody out there remember my “Port of Entry” daily column, before the word “blog” existed?? 🙂 – is now historical fact: a catastrophic number of families, as I’d predicted, had I-829s …