Executive summary: Kushner Companies, a company run by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is building a fifty story luxury apartment building (‘Trump Bay Street’) in Jersey City. OK, great. Its investor procurement is being handled by a company (US Immigration Fund) that does business with Trump in Florida. Also fine. …And US Immigration Fund is financing Trump Bay Street using the unvetted Chinese EB-5 visa program. Fifty million so far in funding, in fact. Apparently almost all Chinese nationals, too!  You know, the folks from the very country that Donald Trump routinely fulminates about in his speeches.

This is where immigration hawks should start to squirm. You see, as this Beitbart article notes, the EB-5 program is essentially a way for foreign nationals to buy green cards. You invest a million bucks in the country, get some jobs going, and hey, presto!  You and your family are on the expedited path to citizenship. Which might be all right as a general concept, of course; except that as the immigration hawks note the system is in fact rife with fraud, abuse, lack of oversight, we’re probably giving green cards to people reporting back to the People’s Republic of China, and whatnot.

And that’s why there’s been a lot of criticism of the EB-5 program – including here at RedState, from yours truly (note that I’m an immigration squish).  You may remember that this program was an issue back in 2013, during the Virginia gubernatorial election: now-Gov. Terry McAuliffe was linked to an EB-5 scheme that traded green cards in exchange for investment in Greentech Automotive’s ‘green’ cars. Legal, barely – but these sorts of things are always legal, because these sorts of things are one of those practices that thrives in a crony capitalist culture.  And, to get back to that Bloomberg article, both Chinese encroachment and immigration reform are supposedly things that Donald Trump cares about:

Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has attacked China and warned about the dangers of deficient immigrant screening.

“They’ve taken our jobs, they’ve taken our money, they’ve taken everything,” he said of China in a speech late last month.

…but apparently Donald Trump doesn’t care enough about either to make sure that a building with his name on it that’s being built by his son-in-law and being financed by his business partners isn’t being funded by Chinese nationals who are taking advantage of a notoriously lax visa program to get themselves unvetted green cards.  Because, hey: fifty million dollars is fifty million dollars. That’s not a trivial amount of Other People’s Money, you know what I mean?

Look, go ahead and vote for Donald Trump because you’re angry. Go ahead and vote for him because you want Washington DC to maybe hear you for a change.  Heck, go ahead and vote for Donald Trump because you like his toupee.  But don’t vote for Donald Trump because he’s an immigration hawk.  He’s not. He’s a crony capitalist who thinks that you’re an idiot.

Simple. As. That.

Moe Lane

PS: The Trump campaign insists that it’s just his name on the building. And that everything was done legally. …Switch out the name Trump for, say, “Clinton” and then ask how much more willing you’d be to accept that defense.