Monday, July 21, 2008


Visas Bring Investors From Abroad To Philly Development Projects
By: Bradley Vasoli, The Bulletin
07/18/2008
Email to a friendPost a CommentPrinter-friendly
Philadelphia - Hundreds of foreign nationals have come to Pa. to invest in major corporate development projects, advocates of an investor visa program said Thursday during a Philadelphia business forum.

The Philadelphia chapters of the Irish-American Chamber of Commerce, the French-American Chamber of Commerce and the German-American Chamber of Commerce set up the event to educate their members about various business visas. H. Ronald Klasko, an immigration lawyer and former national president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said Philadelphia and Seattle have brought in the most investors from overseas under the EB-5 program.

EB-5 visas were created in 1990 to permit investors to come to the United States, to provide low-interest loans for business projects and thereby place them on a path to receiving green cards. Participants must usually provide $500,000, sometimes $1 million, depending on the location of the project. Five years after an investor makes a loan, he or she has the option of cashing out.

"I think that this has been a terrific thing for Philadelphia," Mr. Klasko said.

Several major Philadelphia commercial projects are being financed in part through loans from EB-5 recipients, according to Kelly M. Britt, marketing manager of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) Regional Center. Those ongoing developments include the Aker Philadelphia Shipyard, the Hotel Palomar on 17th and Sansom Streets and the Science Center in University City.

Costing nearly $200 million in total, the developments have taken in $46 million in loans from EB-5 visa holders. Ms. Britt said 1,170 jobs are projected to result from these endeavors.

The PIDC Regional Center acts as a channel whereby investors' loans flow to the companies and as an avenue for sending green-card applications to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. CanAm Enterprises LLC, the center's parent company, has raised roughly $400 million from EB-5 visa holders to date and processed 500 temporary visas as well as 10 non-conditional visas across the U.S.

"Right now we have a lot more people interested [in applying] than they do have projects," Ms. Britt said.

Some immigration experts oppose the program because they do not see a shortage of corporate investors in the U.S. that required bringing in new ones in from abroad.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies and author of the recently released The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, says that if the EB-5 program must continue, it should be restructured to require investments of at least $50 million to maximize the number of jobs it could create. He would also trim down the employment-based visa system to bring in immigrants who are among the best in their career fields.

"The employment- or skills-based visas should be limited to a handful of Einsteins," he said, adding that the EB-1 visa program already provides a channel for extraordinary talents. Other visas, particularly H1-Bs, that admit foreign workers only through their associations with a specified employer, should be viewed as "indentured servitude" and abolished, he said.



Bradley Vasoli can be reached at bvasoli@thebulletin.us

http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cf ... 6361&rfi=8