Agency to help Chinese investors gain US green card

An immigrant consulting agency in Beijing is cooperating with a regional center in the United States in a program that helps Chinese immigrant investors obtain green card.

Well Trend, a Beijing-based agency that helps Chinese people gain permanent residence in other countries, released an EB-5 immigration project in Beijing over the weekend.

The agency will work together with CMB (California Military Bases), a grouping of regional centers in the US, to renovate the century plaza in Los Angeles, according to Larry Wang, president of Well Trend.

The creation of EB-5, or Employment Based Fifth Preference visa, offers a method of obtaining green card for foreigners who would like to immigrate to the US through investment.

In the very beginning, a foreign investor was required to create an entirely new commercial enterprise under the initial EB-5 program.

Things began to change after the Pilot Program was created in 1992, which allowed investments to be made directly into a regional center, which is a private or public third-party-managed investment vehicle.

In the past decade, the number of Chinese people who applied for the EB-5 visa in the US has grown quickly.

Wang recalled that when he first started his business in helping the application of the EB-5 visa in 2005, only about hundreds of Chinese people applied for it.

"The number of applicants reached 10,000 in 2014, which means more than 3,000 Chinese families applied to obtain green card in the US through investment last year," he said.