In recent months federal prosecutors, the courts, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a state regulatory body in Virginia have moved against immigration abuse on three fronts, with further progress being reported recently in all these cases, two of which involve the controversial EB-5 program for immigrant investors.
SEC and the Chicago EB-5 Swindle. Perhaps the biggest black-eye the EB-5 program (in which for half a million dollars the alien's family gets a full set of green cards) has received in its lifetime is the charge that two middlemen in Chicago set in motion what appeared to the SEC to be a massive, $156 million swindle.
Fortunately, $145 million of that was not quite in the hands of the promoters, but the other $11 million was lost, partially to accounts in Hong Kong. This was major business news in China, the home of all or virtually all of the would-be alien investors.
The case has since moved to the federal courts, and the latest news is that the presiding judge, Amy St. Eve, has dismissed a preliminary motion by the defendants to throw the case out of court. For her decision on the motion see here.
A GOP Fundraiser, EB-5, and New York City. Normally, as in the case above, it is the users of the EB-5 funds who find a way to cause mischief in this program, not the alien investors, but in one New York case it was different.
The would-be Israeli investor, Ofer Biton, had a number of distinctions according to court records: he was an illegal alien, he had lied to the government about where he got most of the money for his EB-5 investment (the prosecutors said it was through extortion here in the United States), and he had participated in a variety of questionable fund-raising techniques for the one GOP House member from New York City, Staten Island's Michael G. Grimm, whose campaign finances have been the target of much New York Times investigative reporting as well as an investigation by federal prosecutors.
As the Times reported recently, Biton pled guilty to immigration fraud. The article, sadly typical of the Gray Lady these days, failed to mention Biton's illegal alien status and failed to mention the EB-5 program by name, but led off with his identification as "A former fund-raiser for Representative Michael G. Grimm." For an earlier blog of mine on this case, see here.
ICE Finally Delists the University of Northern Virginia. More than two years after they raided the tiny "educational institution", the University of Northern Virginia in Annandale, Va., Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have decided that the organization should no longer be allowed to issue the I-20 documents that lead to an F-visa for foreign students.
The removal from the list of entities certified by ICE as educational institutions came only after a small state agency, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV), decided to issue a cease and desist order to UNVA on the totally sensible grounds that it could not secure an accreditation from an accreditation agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. The for-profit school, owned by an individual who also owns three Chinese grocery stores, had all of four classrooms in its rented space in the DC suburbs.
The lax federal law covering the certification of schools for use by foreign students does not carry the accreditation requirement demanded by Virginia, even though that state is known for its relaxed regulation of business. ICE did not use other regulatory programs at its disposal to close the controversial for-profit school until the Commonwealth of Virginia did it for them, and ICE took that action only very slowly.
SCHEV issued its cease and desist order on July 16, 2013; the UNVA website announced about two weeks later that it was no longer offering courses; but it took the Student and Exchange Visitor program, a subset of ICE, until August 21 before UNVA disappeared from the agency's list of certified programs.
For more on this situation see this CIS blog and this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
