Results for “buy a house get a visa” 7 found
Buy a House, Get a Visitor Visa?
I have been promoting a “buy a house, get a visa” program for several years, so I was initially pleased to see a new bill on this theme from Sens. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah).
…the proposed measure would offer visas to any foreigner making a cash investment of at least $500,000 on residential real-estate—a single-family house, condo or townhouse. Applicants can spend the entire amount on one house or spend as little as $250,000 on a residence and invest the rest in other residential real estate, which can be rented out.
On closer inspection, however, the bill is very weak. Most importantly, the visa would simply allow the buyer to live in his or her house but would not allow them to work in the United States. Pathetic.
I also liked Matt Yglesias‘s spin on this:
The larger issue, however, is that the Schumer/Lee proposal would deny the new immigrants the right to work in the United States. As with other restrictions on high-skill immigration, this is essentially a form of class warfare against less educated Americans. We should be clamoring to increase the supply of foreign-born doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other highly educated occupations as a way of increasing the real wages of America’s factory workers, janitors, waitresses, carpenters, and retail clerks.
Addendum: Canadians are not impressed with the offer.
Buy a House, Get a Visa (2)
The buy a house, get a visa program which I have been pushing for some time is getting some serious play. Writing in the WSJ, Richard Lefrak and Gary Shilling note:
The blueprint for a program to sell surplus housing to immigrants is already in place with the EB-5 visa program. Each year, 10,000 EB-5 visas for this country are available for foreigners who each invest $1 million in a new enterprise ($500,000 in economically depressed areas) that creates at least 10 full-time jobs. After two years, the entrepreneur and his family can become permanent residents.
Buy a House, Get a Visa
Add Thomas Friedman to Tyler, myself, Lee Ohanian and others suggesting immigration as a way to alleviate the recession:
Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.
Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper.
“We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to
pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate – no Indian
bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not
paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new
companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”
Note that the multiplier on the “buy a house, get a visa” strategy would be much larger than any possible domestic multiplier since the money would come from outside the economy (and efficiency would improve as well.)
I think there would be considerable support among economists that immigration (buy a house, get a visa), a payroll tax cut and maintaining state and local funding would be reasonably good policies in this recession (albeit not necessarily sufficient) yet these policies seem to be the ones that the political system rejects out of hand. (See also Matt Yglesias here and here). Now, I can understand rejecting these policies as compared to doing nothing, ala a precautionary principle, but why these policies are rejected compared to taking a trillion dollar gamble is puzzling even to someone like myself schooled in public choice.
Comprar una casa obtener una visa
It appears that the “buy a house, get a visa” program that I have long advocated will soon been implemented…in Spain.
Spain has between 700,000 and 1.1 million unsold new homes following the collapse of its real estate market in 2008 with an estimated third of them being designed as holiday homes in coastal tourist areas
…Spain plans to offer foreigners residency permits if they buy houses worth more than 160,000 euros, in a desperate attempt to reduce the nation’s glut of unsold property.
…The scheme would also allow foreign buyers to move around the 25-nation Schengen zone freely, as the agreement allows holders of a residency permit of one country in the area to travel to – though not work in – any other.
160,000 euros is the national average price of a property in Spain and that is only $200,000. Spain has some beautiful coastal property and a nice apartment in Barcelona can be had for a bit more. The time to buy could be soon.
The Georgist equilibrium comes to Greece?
The 63-year-old has been been trying to buy an apartment ever since she was evicted from the home she rented for 32 years – when it was bought by Chinese investors two years ago.
“I want some security in case the same thing happens again,” says Ms Hynes, originally from Ireland. She earns a modest salary as an English teacher, while her Greek husband’s monthly pension was cut from €1,500 (£1,315; $1,690) to €500 during the country’s economic crisis, which began in 2010.
“When we were evicted there were still apartments selling nearby for €100,000. Now I can’t find anything under €250,000. These are Chinese and Russian prices. Not Greek.”
Greece’s financial crisis a decade ago shrank the country’s economy by more than 25% in the following years, but there are finally signs of improvement.
The property market, once completely dead, is on the rise – house prices in Athens rose 3.7% last year…
The boom appears to be driven by a controversial “golden visa” scheme, in which non-EU citizens receive residency and free movement in the EU’s Schengen zone, in exchange for investing in property.
The worry is that foreign investors are benefiting while ordinary Greeks miss out.
Many EU countries including the UK, Portugal and Spain, have golden visa schemes, but Greece has the lowest threshold. Investors receive five-year residency after purchasing €250,000 of property, making the country a new hotspot for foreign buyers.
Here is the full Jessica Bateman BBC story, via Ray Lopez. Does a culture of renters bring a bohemian, non-complacent dynamic urban core? Or a bunch of whiners who oppose economic progress? Or both?
Assorted links
1. The net price myth will not save the sustainability of higher education.
2. Purely defensive technological innovation, for cows.
3. Chris Blattman’s African development exam.
4. Will the “buy a home, get a visa” idea spread?
5. Mistakes people make in buying Christmas gifts, by Cass Sunstein. And good summary of what the Greek deal consists of.
6. Fun but somewhat off story on Krugman and Germany, too many overgeneralizations about German psychology, caveat emptor.
Sanity about guest workers, from James Surowiecki
Guest workers are also, paradoxically, less likely than illegal immigrants to become permanent residents. The U.S. already has a number of smaller–and less well-designed–temporary-worker programs, and there’s no evidence that workers in those plans routinely overstay their visas. Mexican workers, contrary to popular belief, do not, generally, intend to live their entire lives in the U.S. Instead, as the sociologists Douglas Massey and Jorge Durand concluded after a comprehensive study of immigrant attitudes and behavior, most want to work “for short periods to generate an alternative source of household income . . . or to accumulate savings for a specific purpose,” like buying a house in Mexico. This is harder to do as an illegal immigrant than as a guest worker, both because illegal workers are paid less and because when an illegal goes home he runs the risk of getting caught. One remarkable study found that after border enforcement was stepped up in 1993 the chances of an illegal immigrant returning to Mexico to stay fell by a third.
Here is the full piece. Please leave comments of high quality. Let’s try two new norms for comments. First, don’t say anything stronger against another commenter (or blogger) than "I don’t agree with you John." Second, it is fine if you are commenting on a single thread more than once, but you should be adding new arguments and material, not just debating with another commenter.
Addendum: Megan Non-McArdle makes excellent points about civility.