The promotional materials for 88 Kushner-KABR, also known as Trump Bay Street, show a building designed with comforts and amenities certain to attract opulent buyers: There are panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, an address just blocks from the Hudson River, and real estate developers with a proven reputation for success.
But this sales pitch for the 50-story, 447-unit apartment building isn't meant for buyers. It's targeting wealthy foreign investors, whom developers hope will trade capital for permanent residency in the United States.
The building is a second tower under construction alongside Trump Plaza in Jersey City's booming luxury real estate market. The $218 million high-rise, announced in 2014, was heralded by The Wall Street Journal as the first big deal between Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka and heir to a real estate fortune of his own. To finance the project, the developers (Kushner Companies and KABR Group, a New Jersey real estate firm) are using $50 million of the $218 million project from wealthy immigrants, secured through an investor visa program known as EB-5, as a Bloomberg Politics report pointed out on Sunday.
The EB-5 investor visa program, created in 1990, offers visas to immigrants who invest $1 million in a commercial project that will create or preserve at least ten jobs in the United States. (They can invest $500,000 if the project takes place in a high-unemployment area.) The program provides a maximum of 10,000 visas each year, many of which lead to green cards: In 2012, only 6 percent of EB-5 visa holders were denied for permanent residency, according to the Brookings Institution.
"This is a really different visa program," said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC. "Most visa programs don't involve any kind of a business deal, and most business deals don't involve issuing visas."
For most of its existence, the EB-5 visa program was largely unused. But as lending standards tightened after the 2008 recession, American developers began to see the program as a viable source of low-interest financing. A more robust recruiting infrastructure emerged abroad, particularly in China, pitching affluent investors on the idea of an EB-5 visa as a relatively certain path to permanent residency in the US. The program hit its visa limit for the first time in 2014, and again in 2015.
A spokesperson for Donald Trump's presidential campaign declined to comment in detail about the Republican frontrunner's involvement with the EB-5 program and the second tower being built alongside Trump Plaza in Jersey City. "This was a highly successful license deal but he is not a partner in the financing of the development," she wrote in a statement via email. Trump often works with developers who pay a licensing fee to use his name, while not dealing directly with financing.