The libertarian Cato Institute is deeply, vehemently for more immigration; it wants some form of amnesty; it wants more legal immigrants; and it particularly wants more non-immigrant workers, as this page shows.
Immigrants will help the economy grow, they say; we will all prosper if there are lots of additional, willing workers.
So how does Cato — pro-economic expansion, pro-immigration — feel about the EB-5 program?
That's the government's program that sells alien investors, for half a million dollars, a fistful of green cards for themselves, their spouses, and their children.
More aliens with money, more overseas money for the economy, what could be more attractive to Cato?
Well, the international trade people at Cato haven't received the memo.
Late last month Cato published a 28-page Policy Analysis paper entitled "Reversing Worrisome Trends: How to Attract and Retain Investment in a Competitive Global Economy". It is a serious piece, bordering on the ponderous.
The study was written by Daniel Ikenson, who carries the title of director of Cato's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, and who is the author of numerous tracts on international trade.
The report is full of hard-to-follow graphs, a set of 58 carefully assembled footnotes, and plenty of arguments about "labor unions destructive power over the workplace ... excessive regulation ... a featherbedded disability system for its workers", all supporting a pitch that the country really, really needs to attract still more foreign investment.
Being on Cato's distribution list (through no fault of my own), I eagerly opened the document in the day's mail to look for a reference to EB-5, or the immigrant investor program, or at least something on immigration. I found nothing.
To double check that first impression, I brought the document up on my screen and did searches for "EB-5", "EB 5", "EB5", "immigrant investor", "visa", and "immigration" itself. I found only two tangential uses of "immigration", neither of them substantive and neither related to the investor program.
Maybe Mr. Ikenson knows, as we have previously reported, that the EB-5 program, despite its support by both business interests and the Obama administration, contributes something like six cents of every hundred dollars of new foreign investment to this country, and thus, has, in recent years, chipped in about a farthing for every $100 of all foreign investment in the nation, new and old.
On this issue Cato is totally correct: If you are writing about foreign investment policy, the EB-5 program is not worth mentioning.