EB5 Investors Magazine (English Edition) Volume 5, Issue 1 | Page 13

Follow five foreign investors who are among the nearly 10,000 people who annually earn their green card through the EB-5 program. By EB5 Investors Magazine Staff E B-5 immigrant investors move across the ocean for a myriad of reasons but the biggest draws might be to live the American dream and enjoy high quality education and career opportunities. Of the visa applicants, Chinese nationals make up over 80 percent. An increasing trend is for young Chinese students to apply for an EB-5 visa with the help of their parents in order to make it easier when applying to college, hunting for a job or advancing in a career in the United States. One of them is Wilson Ye, a 20-year-old sophomore studying at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of more than 320,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. He has also embarked on a mission to make the voices of EB-5 investors heard among U.S. policymakers by performing a large survey and lobby their cause in Congress. He is using his 50-page report of more than 800 Chinese immigrant investors and their family members to highlight their concerns of the laws and regulations. Another student waiting for his EB-5 visa is Vince Wu, a 25-year-old scholar in the doctorate program of electrical engineering at Harvard University. To be able to work in the United States in the future, he spent a year gathering the required documents to invest $500,000 in the EB-5 program. Due to the quota of the program reaching capacity so quickly, he might still need to wait a couple of years to get his green card. Other investors opt to move the whole family to the United States to give their children unique opportunities. One of those is Shixiong Hu, who decided to travel across the ocean with his wife in 2015 to create a better future for their daughter. The couple started to plan to invest in the American real estate market in 2012 while they were expecting their first child. When they arrived in the States, they bought a house in Seattle. While waiting for a permanent green card through the EB-5 investor program, Hu is still traveling back and forth to run his business in Beijing. Another EB-5 investor family is Sharon Xu who decided to invest $500,000 in the Philadelphia Expo Center to give her two sons a healthier life in America. Her children’s battle with respiratory health issues each winter triggered her to leave China to raise them in a cleaner environment. After five years, her investment proved so successful that she was repaid the full amount of her EB-5 investment. Shanghai native Jin Li, who used EB-5 to move her family to Guam, was also refunded her $500,000 investment. In 2014, her family was sworn in as naturalized US citizens and her twin daughters are now competing in badminton for the United States. The five investors are among the about 10,000 people who annually earn their green card through applying through the EB-5 program. In 2016, about 7,800 of them came from China. EB5INVESTORS.COM 12