U.S. Citizenship Should Not Be for Saleby Phyllis Schlafly
Outsourcing is not the only way we are losing American jobs to Communist China. The Chinese have figured out how to capture jobs inside the U.S. by using our EB-5 visas (employment-based, fifth priority).Most Americans have never heard of this visa, but the Chinese are now planning to use it to build and run a casino labeled Maryland Live! near the Baltimore airport. Boasting 4,750 slot machines, this $440 million casino will be one of the largest in the country.Failing to attract enough U.S. investors for this big-time gambling center, the promoters went to Shanghai in September and made a sales pitch to 50 rich Chinese to invest $500,000 each in this Maryland casino, which seems to offer a profitable return. The sweetest part of the deal, however, is that the investor's entire family will be rewarded with a set of U.S. green cards valid for life, a system called "investment immigration."
EB-5 visas were created to promote investment in depressed areas, but the area isn't depressed and Maryland's unemployment rate is about 2 percentage points lower than the nation's. Skillful gerrymandering produced a map to label a parking lot in the huge Arundel Mills Mall a "targeted unemployment area."Don't count on the Maryland casino to produce good jobs for Americans. If the Chinese follow the pattern they used in building the San-Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, low-paid Chinese workers will be imported to build and staff the casino.To qualify for EB-5 visas, each investor need create only ten jobs, and they can be "indirectly created," whatever that means. And the investment can be withdrawn after only 24 months.Another EB-5 case involved a dairy farm in South Dakota. It created some jobs, but 16 of the 17 regular employees turned out to be illegal aliens. Maybe milking cows wasn't an exciting occupation for Chinese families rich enough to make a $500,000 investment.Idaho Governor Butch Otter, backed up by the U.S. and Idaho Departments of Commerce and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, traveled to China last year to sell the Chinese on the idea of using EB-5 visas to invest in Idaho. Otter is calling the EB-5 visa a "key element" of his effort to attract new foreign investment to Idaho.So China is trying to build a 10,000- to 30,000-acre "technology zone" south of the Boise airport with full landing rights to the Boise airport, including industry, retail centers, and homes leased to the Chinese. This project will have a manufacturing and warehouse zone tied to the airport, and may expand with building and financing a fertilizer plant near American Falls, Idaho. Idaho residents are not happy about Communist China trying to colonize their state. The multi-billion-dollar Chinese company initiating this project, Sinomach, has also sent delegations to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. While more Americans are unemployed, living on food stamps, and being foreclosed on, Communist China is trying to buy our land, businesses, homes, and natural resources. Our globalist-minded government is assisting with the bait of EB-5 visas.The free-trade advocates have floated the peculiar notion that we should import foreign students, award them advanced degrees, and then give them a green card so they can legally remain in the United States and get good engineering jobs instead of Americans. Where did the weird idea come from that our country of 300 million people must look to other countries not only for large investors but also for smart graduate students with advanced degrees? Stapling a green card to foreign students' diplomas has become a favorite one-liner of New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, Governor Mitt Romney, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) even introduced a bill called the Staple Act of 2011 (Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s from Leaving the Economy). The Times Square bomber is a good example of the deception that foreigners who attend U.S. universities are "the best and the brightest." He was allowed to stay in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, on the basis of his degree in "computer applications" from a so-so college, and was later even granted U.S. citizenship. Fortunately, Faisal Shahzad wasn't bright enough to accomplish his destructive goal.We've had four nationally televised debates featuring 2012 Republican presidential candidates. It's a mystery why the usually aggressive media interrogators haven't asked any questions about how China is buying its way in America with our money, how free trade is cheating us coming and going, how China is stealing our intellectual property and patents, how China has sold us poisonous and defective products, how China is building a tremendous military machine with U.S. dollars, and the racket of the preferential visas that give jobs to non-Americans.