Asaria: Caribbean CIPs Should Adopt EB-5-Style Employment Requirements

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“I think that, in the Caribbean, a lot can be learned from the EB-5 industry,” said Range Developments’ Co-Founder and Vice Chairman Mohammed Asaria during an interview with IMI in Geneva earlier this week.

“In the 2010 to 2015 period, $16 billion of capital was raised through EB-5, and that was in an environment that was post-credit crunch, where both debt-capital and equity-capital were very scarce,” he continued.

In the same period, Asaria pointed out, “EB-5 capital supported 276,000 jobs in the US. Now, you’ve got to put that in context; 276,000 jobs is the equivalent of all the employees of Apple and Microsoft put together, and those two companies have a market cap of 2 trillion dollars. So, EB-5 has been responsible for the creation of jobs equivalent to a 2-trillion market-cap business.”

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The co-founder argues that the chief reason EB-5 has driven such tremendous job-growth is the program’s employment requirement, which mandates the creation of ten indirect jobs.

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“If we could adopt that best practice in the Caribbean,” adds Asaria, pointing to possible policies where CIP-investment is contingent on employment or where the number of citizenships is correlated with the number of jobs, “we would see much greater benefit for the local community.”

Watch the full interview below.