This will be gamed hard by rich people to get into the U.S.
Essentially a red carpet side door if you have a slab of cash.
Essentially a red carpet side door if you have a slab of cash.
However, these visas require that people invest their own money. This visa is different because it allows investment with other people's money. It's a big change.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/gree...
All this means in reality is that once you've come to the US and established the basis for another visa, your "intent" changes and you apply for an applicable immigration visa. People do every year with both the F-1 and the E-2 visa.
However, some people prefer to reside in the US long term with non immigration status. The E-2 allows people to emigrate to the US and remain there, indefinitely renewing their E-2 visa, whilst (i) protecting their future non-US tax status, and (2) entering and exiting the US for long periods of time (as long as the business is operating successfully). This contrasts with a green card, which (i) subjects green card holders to "citizen-like" tax obligations after a specified period of time and (ii) typically requires continuous residence in the US.
The continuous presence restriction would lift upon receipt of citizenship but not everyone wants (or is able) to hold dual citizenships.
An E-2 is just fine for many rich people.
There is already something like what you are suggesting in the U.S. AFAIK, just $500k or $1M depending on the situation.
It's an attempt to soften the harsh consequences that often arise from these counterintuitive rules in a very technical legal space that is almost impossible to legislatively correct.
For example in late 2000 the US government didn't get around to renewing the "visa waiver" law in time. Rather than suddenly requiring visas from everybody from the former visa waiver countries (and cause travel chaos), passports were stamped "PAROLED" for visa waiver people (mostly tourists) entering until the law was renewed. (I had a stamp like that in October 2000).
The rich pay almost all tax.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-inco... Shows the top 50% paying nearly all the taxes. That is a far cry from the rich.
So as a simple-language summary we might all agree that the rich pay a majority of the taxes, while the richer half of the country pays nearly all the taxes.
Note that the "richer half" starts at the median income. For the US, the median income is about $52k. That isn't particularly wealthy. When the bar for "nearly all the wealth" is set at that point, it is not surprising at all.
"The average American household of 2.64 people receives almost $13,000 worth of federal benefits, services, and protection per annum. These people would have to have a family income of $53,700 to pay as much in taxes as they get in goodies... Only 4.8 percent of the population -- 12,228,000 people -- file income tax returns showing more than $50,000 in adjusted gross income. Ninety-five percent of Americans are on the mooch." -- P. J. O'Rourke [1]
They may pay a lower percentage of taxes on wealth gains than middle class or upper middle class, due to being able to delay income realization, lower capital gains taxes, and other means that are more accessible to the rich than the middle class or the poor.
But rich people still tend to pay more taxes than less rich people.
Spend 15 minutes talking to an accountant on the premise that you don't want to pay any tax. If you've got enough cash, that's not a problem, anywhere in the World.
You can immediately become Canadian permanent resident by merely LOANING the province of Quebec $800K for five years. At current interest rates your actual monetary loss would be ~$80K.
You don't even need any qualifications. You don't even need to live in Quebec afterwards, you're free to move anywhere.
Oh and you can become Canadian citizen after three years of living in Canada, although because Canada does not reliably track people at its borders you can just fake passport stamps and other stuff. Recent revelations showed that people have been doing that at massive scale.
I don't have even the vaguest idea of policy in this (although I'm sure there's some research I can read up on), but I think something can be done, whether via some kind of redistribution scheme, regulation, etc. to attempt to mitigate these effects by redistributing aggregate gains to those hurt hard. I watched many people develop virulent xenophobia and racism because of the issues of undocumented labor and improperly managed migration. I wish in addition to free trade treaties we could have free movement treaties without having to form some pseudo federation like the EU.
The EB-5 is a huge site for immigration fraud and in many cases it functions as a green card-for-cash exchange. In fact, the poor foreign investors who didn't understand this are now suing state governments and associated companies because they received no returns from their investment.[1]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellensheng/2016/08/01/foreign-in...
Google "EB-5 fraud" for many many more cases but note that, unlike in most immigration cases, the fraud here is being perpetrated against the visa applicants, not the immigration service. There is no suggestion that they do not have the capital or that they have not received a visa, just that there are no returns.