February 16, 2016

sad_paul_ryan
When I watched this segment of Liar of the House Paul Ryan's Doom and Gloom tour on Fox's Sunday Morning Futures, the first thing that struck me was how he kept wanting to push the modern day version of St. Ronny's welfare queens mythology. Namely, unemployment was so high because everyone loved being on welfare.

I got news for Ryan - if the rate of pay is so low that $800 per month is a good deal, welfare ain't the problem.

The next thing that struck me was the way the host, Maria Bartiromo, was absolutely obsessed with blaming all the nation's woes on immigrants. Immigrants were taking our jobs. Immigrants were taking our money. I was waiting for her to cite Donald Trump and his slurs about Mexicans.

But those comments by Ryan and Bartiromo, as disgusting and offensive as they might be, are par for the course for these sorts of reprobates.

What did stand out to me was when Ryan argued that green cards should be given out based solely on what the immigrant "could contribute to the economy." If the gentle reader thought that Ryan meant only hard workers or people that could invent new and great things, they would be wrong.

What Ryan meant was people that would qualify for EB-5, the Visa-for-Sale program:

Immigration dominates the news today, and it’s just the latest crucial issue locked in a bitter Washington stalemate. The consequences have been dire. Whether it’s tens of thousands of impoverished children detained by border officials and clogging government facilities, or scientists and engineers highly coveted by technology companies who aren’t permitted to remain here, the U.S. is preventing countless foreigners from staying in this country.

Increasingly, the skilled and the poor are out of luck. But the rich are another matter. The program (EB-5 is short-hand for the government’s fifth employment-based visa “preference”) allows well-heeled foreigners to leap to the front of the line by simply plunking down $500,000.

One thing that the gentle reader can take to the bank is that Ryan really means it too. He means it so much, he sneaked an extension of it into the omnibus bill that he wrote and got passed at the end of last year:

The other donor-service provision slipped into the omnibus spending bill is a straight renewal of the scandal-plagued EB-5 investor visa program. The program sells permanent residence in the United States for the entire family in exchange for a $500,000 investment (usually in a high-end real estate development) that supposedly produces 10 jobs (though you can pay an economist to concoct a story about “indirect” job creation).

Hey, why settle for just domestic graft when you can have foreign graft too?

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