Jay Peak Ponzi Scheme: Immigrant Investors File Class Action Against Vermont
classaction.org
classaction.org
Edit: EB-5 grants a green card (permanent residency), not citizenship directly. Although getting the green card is required for eventually gaining citizenship.
Your wording implies that there's some sort of a queue that wannabe immigrants must join, unless they're wealthy, in which case they can simply "buy American citizenship for $500,000."
Yes exactly. 10+ years long for many categories and longer from some specific countries. Or, go the EB-5 route if you can afford it, with "No Wait" (except for Chinese applicants).
China and Mexico also suffer a bit, but it is not as bad.
Every other country has zero waititimes, so it takes about 3 years to get the rest of the red rape out of the way.
I'd suggest the best source to get your questions answered is not a random comment thread, but the US State Dept's Visa Bulletin, which the Boundless article links to.
Joking aside, there are many many people on HN who have gone through the naturalization process so their experience is a reasonable source for approximate waiting times.
Obviously INS will have the official estimates but in my experience those were off by quite a bit.
As we seem to agree, there is no such thing as "the normal waiting process", so there's really nothing "to skirt" or "to buy their way to the front of".
In fact, presently, in the US there is absolutely no 'pathway to citizenship', 'normal waiting process', or 'legal immigration pathway' in the general sense -- in the way that it existed in the US prior to 1920s. Diversity visa lottery comes the closest to that, making 55,000 visas per year available to 10+ million applicants from 'underrepresented countries' -- the list of which among others explicitly excludes China, India, and Mexico.
To have a realistic shot at legal immigration, the wannabe immigrant, unless he/she qualifies as a refugee, must either (F) have a close family relationship with a US citizen OR (EB) satisfy requirements for an employment-based visa. Both F and EB immigration categories have multiple subcategories, each in turn subject to quotas and subquotas based on country of origin (typically, China, India, Mexico, Philippines, and the RestOfTheWorld).
So, if you're an Indian national in the EB-3 category (which means that you have jumped through a bunch of hoops already: you have at least a Bachelor degree or equivalent, you have won the H-1B lottery and your application was approved, and your greencard is getting sponsored by your employer), you'll have no hope of actually getting your greencard in any reasonable amount of time.
Instead, all that's left for you is to get upset with a whole lot of people 'skirting the process': F2A spouses of US citizens (how dare they marry their way to the front of the line?!), EB-1 extraordinary people, outstanding researchers, and managers (how dare they achieve their way to the front of the line?!), and EB-5 investors (how dare they buy their way to the front of the line?!). Which is still a fundamentally wrong way to think about it, even if the system is fundamentally illogical, ineffective, and unfair.
It takes years to get a green card, after that it takes something like 10 years before you can apply for citizenship.
When my green card was approved, the wait time for it to actually be granted was still something like 5 years.
From what I’ve heard, most immigrants break-even or lose a bit on their investment after brokers fees and such.
if the minimum investment is $500k as other commenters have noted, then that seems like a pretty good deal? even with a 10% loss it's only $50k for a visa.
* J1 / E5 visa abuse to skirt labor and wage laws and get cheap investments
* Overselling / abusive terms of carriage for lifts
* Overpricing basic food and services, assigning abusive police-style regulators on slopes (looking at you vail)
So at the end of the day, we have to take a look and think: should lifting skiers up a mountain on a chairlift really be worth billions of dollars in market cap? Should mountains, who are almost 90% public land (in the USA), even be businesses?