A North Korean Drama Made for TV

What a wild and wonderful place international trade seems to be.  In the Wall Street Journal today is a story that tells us background on a loophole that allows a person who is among the largest facilitators of trade with North Korea to get a green card to live permanently in the U.S.  This loophole is in something I have been talking about now for some time - the EB-5 visa program - where 90% of the beneficiaries are Chinese.  These particular persons, Chi Yupeng and his wife, Zhang Bing, are on a list of individuals being sanctioned for trading with North Korea.  

Perhaps we might wonder how people with sanctions on them would end up with Green Cards, giving them resident alien status in the U.S.  The same government that puts sanctions on someone, would not want that person living in the U.S. with those types of privileges.  That allows them to live and work in the United States, donate to political groups as if they were U.S. Citizens, and avoid many constraints that bind non-US persons on other types of visas. However they endear themselves to local governments by buying their way into the country, this is the kind of conflict that comes from greed.  

The former Governor of our State of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe,  was once identified by the Inspector General of Homeland Security (which issues these visas) as a person who attempted to influence the Deputy Director to grant more visas to industries in Virginia.  The Chinese were taking advantage of local issues to get visas allowing them to live and work in the U.S.  those same people were giving huge sums to the political parties, especially the Democrats.   McAuliffe was one of Hillary Clinton’s major fund raisers.  

The big beneficiaries of these programs (Jared Kushner was supposed to be one, according to some press articles) don’t seem to mind that this is Chinese money in U.S. politics.  Both political parties have managed to look the other way, but extend the hand of friendship to those who give money right into that palm.  That is how a person on the North Korea sanctions list gets to be a resident alien in the U.S.