Expert: Almost 90% of EB-5 Investors from China

China Daily, Mar. 9, 2016 - "Investors from China currently account for almost 90 percent of all EB-5 investors," Stephen Yale-Loehr, a law professor at Cornell University, told China Daily. ... Originally, few people immigrated to the U.S. using EB-5. As late as 2008, only 1,000 people a year came in through the program,said Yale-Loehr. However, the financial crisis resulted in the loss of domestic lending sources for many U.S. developers who discovered the EB-5 program as an alternative way to finance some or all of their projects. In 2014, 10,000 took advantage of the EB-5 program, Yale-Loehr noted. ... "Although EB-5 investors only account for about 1 percent of all U.S. immigration annually, the program has an outsized economic impact. EB-5 applicants have invested more than $13 billion since 2008 and have created tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers," said Yale-Loehr. Despite the Trump name on a building financed in part by Chinese investors and the candidate's attacks on China and immigration, Yale-Loehr doesn't anticipate EB-5 becoming a hot topic in the presidential campaign. "I doubt EB-5 will be that big of an issue in the presidential race if only because they have so many other issues to discuss. For example, Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration has garnered a lot more attention than EB-5," he said."