[Source: NPR Staff; Published January 26, 2013]
The traditional immigrant story is a familiar one.
Someone who longs for a better life makes the tough journey, leaves behind the hardships of his or her native land and comes to the United States to start again. That story, in a lot of ways, helped build this country.
These days, however, there's a very different kind of immigrant who wants to come to this country — the rich — and they have a different set of dreams.
Anthony Korda was a barrister, or lawyer, in England who vacationed frequently in the U.S. with his family.
"Each time we left the nice weather of Florida, we were more depressed about having to leave," Korda tells NPR's Robert Smith.
Korda says they did not look forward to slogging through the London rain, so he made a lifestyle choice: He was going to immigrate to the U.S. and live in a place where you could get a real tan.
Korda found pretty quickly, though, that the last thing the U.S. needed was more lawyers, so a standard or employment-based visa was unlikely. But then he saw a shortcut to becoming an American in a small, obscure federal program called EB-5, designed for people like him to get into the country — if they had enough money.
"It looked too good to be true," he says.
All Korda had to do was cash out most of his savings — about $500,000 — and invest in an American business. If he could help create 10 jobs, then he would get a green card.
Korda's investment was a ski resort in Vermont that was looking to improve its infrastructure. So he put down his money and got to move to Florida and vacation in Vermont. He and his family got the American dream, but what did America get in return?
Continue reading article here: Investing In Citizenship: For The Rich, A Road To The U.S.
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