That's nothing new, if you pay $1million (or $500k depending on the area of investment) then you can essentially get a green card as it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
Portugal has a similar system, called "Golden Visas", which is significantly cheaper. Of course, being true to this country, there's already a five year backlog due to bureaucracy and investigations into misappropriations and fraud.
I doubt it. There are already 2 programs that allow rich people to immigrate by investing their own money: the EB-5 and the E-2 visa [1].
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.
The E-2 is a non immigration visa without dual intent. So... just like an F-1 student visa which is a non immigration visa without dual intent.
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.
I am not native English speaker so I might be misreading, but isn't parole meant to be for people in prison? So how does this have anything to do with getting into the U.S.?
There is already something like what you are suggesting in the U.S. AFAIK, just $500k or $1M depending on the situation.
Parole is a term used by immigration for cases where they use their own authority to let someone in when the law doesn't quite allow it.
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).
Parole essentially means granting the right to enter or remain the US to an applicant who does not technically meet the conditions for the visa or status. It's usually applied on humanitarian grounds or to fill "gaps" in the immigration system [1] where there would be negative consequences.
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.
"Parole" refers to any situation where someone is given some trust for a period of time before they are given complete trust. It usually refers to people who get out of prison but have to check in with a parole officer for a while, but in this case it refers to immigrants being allowed into the country but having to check in with DHS.
Of course we would want that, but that's not what we get. The rich pay few taxes and the international rich pay even less, given they already have offshore tax havens by the nature of being from another country. Given a green card allows establishment of US companies which are exempt from some tariffs which are imposed on foreign companies, there's no reason to believe that giving the rich green cards will be a net gain for tax revenue. It is indeed sometimes a net loss.
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.
Demonstrably not true in absolute terms in many cases, or as a percentage of income in others.
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.
A humorous way to express the same idea is that the non-rich are actually sponging off the rich:
"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]
The data you link to shows that the top 5% income people pay 58.55% of all taxes, while the the top 50% pay 97.22%, as you indicated.
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.
FWIW Canada beats US out of the water on this one.
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.
Considering the enormous benefits of moving to the US for most of the people in the world, I don't really like the idea of it being easier for the rich rather than the poor to migrate when they're already rich. For a lot of people, crossing a border and doing the exact same job can easily 5-10x real income. It's what my dad did. What I would like is a preferential option for the poor in migration policies. The positive aggregate effects of migration are well known as generally positive according to mainstream economic analysis, but the social problem is that, similar to free trade, it's a policy that creates very very invisible gains (largely unnoticeable as an individual things like marginally lower prices, marginally higher productivity) but with extremely concentrated and visible harm. The family trade is carpentry and I grew up working in it and viscerally saw being undercut by contractors using undocumented labor, so i know it's real. I just think migration doesn't have to be structured this way.
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.
You need to raise the money from investors with a track record of investing in high growth startups, so won't be quite as easy as writing yourself a $250k check.
It would also be a stupid thing to game this rule when there already exists a separate system that allows you to write a 500k check and get a green card.
Nope. You mean you need a consultation firm that does all of this for you for a fee, of which there are many.
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]
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.
It depends. A rich person (multi-million range) in Delhi, a city covered with massive pollution, unbearable traffic might be much better of moving with family to US. A billionaire type might have other things to consider.