Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

Illegal Immigration, $135 BILLION a Year

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Primer: One of the easiest things to do is to scam and fraud the Federal government without consequence as noted by this report by the DHS Office of Inspector General when it comes to being illegal with multiple identities and claim any and or all benefits from entitlement programs and still not be deported.

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Illegal immigration costing record $135 billion a year, study shows

The swelling population of illegal immigrants and their kids is costing American taxpayers $135 billion a year, the highest ever, driven by free medical care, education and a huge law enforcement bill, according to the the most authoritative report on the issue yet.

And despite claims from pro-illegal immigration advocates that the aliens pay significant off-setting taxes back to federal, state and local treasuries, the Federation for American Immigration Reform report tallied just $19 billion, making the final hit to taxpayers about $116 billion.

State and local governments are getting ravaged by the costs, at over $88 billion. The federal government, by comparison, is getting off easy at $45 billion in costs for illegals.

President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and conservatives in Congress are moving aggressively to deal with illegals, especially those with long criminal records. But their effort is being fought by courts and some 300 so-called “sanctuary communities” that refuse to work with federal law enforcement.

The added burden on taxpayers and the unfairness to those who have applied to come into the United States through legal channels is also driving the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The added burden on taxpayers and the unfairness to those who have applied to come into the United States through legal channels is also driving the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The report, titled “The Fiscal Burden Of Illegal Immigration on U.S. Taxpayers,” is the most comprehensive cost tally from FAIR. It said that the costs have jumped about $3 billion in four years and will continue to surge unless illegal immigration is stopped. It was provided in advance exclusively to Secrets.

“Clearly, the cost of doing nothing to stop illegal immigration is far too high,” said FAIR Executive Director Dan Stein. “President Trump has laid out a comprehensive strategy to regain control of illegal immigration and bring down these costs,” said Stein. “Building the wall, enhancing interior enforcement and mandating national E-Verify will go a long way in bringing these ridiculously high costs under control,” he added.

Over 68 often shocking pages, FAIR documents the average $8,075 in state, local and federal spending for each of the of 12.5 million illegal immigrants and their 4.2 million citizen children.

Broadly, the costs include $29 billion in medical care, $23 billion for law enforcement, $9 billion in welfare, $46 billion for education.

Just consider the cost of teaching an illegal alien child who doesn’t speak English. FAIR estimates an average cost of over $12,000 a year, and that can reach $25,000 in New York. Add to that welfare, health care, school lunches, and the per student price soars.

In state costs alone, California leads the list at $23 billion per year, followed by Texas at $11 billion, and New York at $7.4 billion.

And it also documents the taxes paid and how they don’t come close to offsetting the costs. What’s more, FAIR noted that 35 percent of the illegal population operate in an underground economy hidden from tax collectors. And worse, employers hire illegals and either pay them cheaply or under the table.

“The United States recoups only about 14 percent of the amount expended annually on illegal aliens. If the same jobs held by illegal aliens were filled by legal workers, at the prevailing market wage, it may safely be presumed that federal, state and local governments would receive higher tax payments,” said FAIR.

Key findings pulled from the report:

  • The staggering total costs of illegal immigrants and their children outweigh the taxes paid to federal and state governments by a ratio of roughly 7 to 1, with costs at nearly $135 billion compared to tax revenues at nearly $19 billion.
  • The nearly $135 billion paid out by federal and state and local taxpayers to cover the cost of the presence of 12.5 million illegal aliens and their 4.2 million citizen children amounts to approximately $8,075 per illegal alien and citizen child prior to taxes paid, or $6,940 per person after taxes are paid.
  • On the federal level, medical ($17.14 billion) is by far the highest cost, with law enforcement coming second ($13.15 billion) and general government services ($8 billion) third.
  • At the state and local level, education ($44.4 billion) was by far the largest expense, followed by general public services ($18.5 billion) and medical ($12.1 billion).
  • The top three states based on total cost to state taxpayers for illegal immigrants and their children: California ($23 billion); Texas ($10.9 billion), and New York ($7.5 billion).

Cost Study 2017 Web by Anonymous XPD7OrbmF on Scribd

Russia Bought BLM Ads Dupes Were Willing

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This website has published countless articles warning of these operations going back as far as 2014. This site has also warned of Russian hybrid warfare as noted by the Gerasimov Doctrine.

Russian State, Non-State Cyber Intrusions Sway Voting/Political Decisions

Russian Troll Operations Continue, What are You Reading?

During the campaign season, the Obama White House knew more than they were telling or sharing. Furthermore, that same White House refused to take any real action with regard to Russian interference.

Huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy fix, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation. More here.

Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit divisions over Black Lives Matter, Muslims

ChicagoTribune: The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

The nature and detail of these ads has troubled investigators at Facebook, on Capitol Hill and at the U.S. Justice Department, say people familiar with the advertisements who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share matters still under investigation.

The House and Senate Intelligence committees plan to begin reviewing the Facebook ads in coming weeks as they attempt to untangle the operation and other matters related to Russia’s bid to help elect Trump in 2016.

“Their aim was to sow chaos,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout.”

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped the public would be able to review the ad campaign.

“I think the American people should see a representative sample of these ads to see how cynical the Russian were using these ads to sow division within our society,” he said, noting that he had not yet seen the ads but had been briefed on them, including the ones mentioning “things like Black Lives Matter.”

The ads which Facebook found raise troubling questions for a social networking and advertising platform that reaches two billion people each month and offer a rare window into how Russian operatives carried out their information operations during an especially tumultuous period in U.S. politics.

Investigators at Facebook discovered the Russian ads in recent weeks, the company has said, after months of trying in vain to trace disinformation efforts back to Russia. The company has said it had identified at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts. Facebook has said this spending represented a tiny fraction of the political advertising on the platform for the 2016 campaign.

The previously-undisclosed ads suggest that Russian operatives worked off of evolving lists of racial, religious, political and economic themes. They used these to create pages, write posts and craft ads that would appear in user’s news feeds — with the apparent goal of appealing to one audience and alienating another. In some cases, the pages even tried to organize events.

“The idea of using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism is an old tactic. It’s not unique to the United States and it’s a global phenomenon,” said Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, California. and the executive director for the Center for Media Justice. Social media companies “have a mandate to standup and take deep responsibility for how their platforms are being abused.”

Facebook declined to comment on the contents of the ads being turned over to congressional investigators, and pointed to a Sept. 6 statement by Alex Stamos, the company’s chief security officer, who noted that the vast majority of the ads run by the 470 pages and accounts did not specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or any particular candidate.

“Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the idealogical spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights,” Stamos said at the time.

Moscow’s interest in U.S. race relations date back decades.

In Soviet times, operatives didn’t have the option of using the Internet, so they spread their messages by taking out ads in newspapers, posting fliers and organizing meetings.

Much like the online ads discovered by Facebook, messages spread by Soviet-era operatives were meant to look as though they were written by bonafide political activists in the United States, thereby disguising the involvement of an adversarial foreign power.

Russian information operations didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After a lull in tensions, Russia’s spy agencies became more assertive under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, those services have updated their propaganda protocols to take advantage of new technologies and the proliferation of social media platforms.

“Is it a goal of the Kremlin to encourage discord in American society? The answer to that is yes,” said former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “More generally, Putin has an idea that our society is imperfect, that our democracy is not better than his, so to see us in conflict on big social issues is in the Kremlin’s interests.”

Clinton Watts, part of a research team that was among the first to warn publicly of the Russian propaganda campaign during the 2016 election, said that identifying and exploiting existing social and cultural divisions are common Russian disinformation tactics dating back to the Cold War.

“We have seen them operating on both sides” said Watts, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent.

When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, no one could have anticipated the company would become an advertising juggernaut worth almost half a trillion dollars — the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Roughly a third of the world’s population now log in monthly.

As Facebook’s user base rapidly expanded, it wrote the playbook for digital targeting in the smartphone era — and for the type of micro-targeting that has become critical to modern political campaigns.

The social network invested heavily in building highly-sophisticated automated advertising tools that could target specific groups of people who had expressed their preferences and interests on Facebook, from newlyweds who studied at Dartmouth College to hockey enthusiasts living in a particular zip code in Michigan.

The migration from traditional personal computers to smartphones and tablets also helped Facebook gain a major edge: The company pioneered techniques to help advertisers reach the same user on their desktop and mobile devices, leading Facebook to grow seven-fold in its value since it went public in 2012. Today, advertisers who want to target Facebook users by demographics or interests have tens of thousands of categories to choose from, and they are able to flood users with ads wherever they go on the Internet.

Unlike most websites, where ads appear alongside content, ads on Facebook have directly appeared in people’s newsfeeds since 2012. If users like a page, the administrators of that page can pay for ads and post content that will then appear in the cascade of information from publishers and friends that users see right away when they log onto Facebook.

Since the 2012 presidential election, Facebook has become an essential tool for political campaigns that wish to target potential voters. During the height of election season, political campaigns are among the largest advertisers on Facebook. Facebook has built a large sales staff of account executives, some of whom have backgrounds in politics, that are especially trained to assist campaigns in spreading their messages, increasing engagement, and getting immediate feedback on how they are performing.

The Trump campaign used these tools to great effect, while Clinton’s campaign preferred to rely on its own social media experts, according to people familiar with the campaigns.

Since taking office, Putin has on occasion sought to spotlight racial tensions in the United States as a means of shaping perceptions of American society.

Putin injected himself in 2014 into the race debate after protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American, by a police officer who was white.

“Do you believe that everything is perfect now from the point of view of democracy in the United States?” Putin told CBS’ 60 Minutes. “If everything was perfect, there wouldn’t be the problem of Ferguson. There would be no abuse by the police. But our task is to see all these problems and respond properly.”

In addition to the ads described to The Post, Russian operatives used Facebook to promote anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messages. Facebook has said that one-quarter of the ads bought by the Russian operatives identified so far were targeted to a particular geographic area.

While Facebook has downplayed the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

“$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful,” he said. “When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”

Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, has not seen the Facebook ads promised to Congress, but he and his team saw similar tactics playing out on Twitter and other platforms during the campaign.

Watts said such efforts were most likely to have been effective in mid-Western swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders had beaten Clinton. Watts said the disinformation pushed by the Russians includes messages designed to reinforce the idea that Sanders had been mistreated by the Democratic Party and that his supporters shouldn’t bother to vote during the general election in November.

“They were designed around hitting these fracture points, so they could see how they resonate and assess their effectiveness,” Watts said. “I call it reconnaissance by social media.”

The Rest of the Questions/Conditions Regarding North Korea

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The Beijing government knows full well all the ins and outs of North Korea including all banking relationships, cyber attacks, illicit activities, counterfeiting and gets assistance from China on how to skirt international sanctions. Still, China has the ability to make the world safer from the rogue Kim regime including outside assistance from Syria, Venezuela, Iran and Russia. Whatever the future holds for global security and equilibrium, Beijing is responsible.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is fixated on obtaining a serious nuclear arsenal, and continues to thumb his nose at the U.S. and other world powers. The latest round of United Nations Security Council sanctions approved Monday are not going to change that. But one aspect of them — new measures to interdict ships breaking trade embargoes against Pyongyang — could be baby steps toward much stronger sanctions enforcement.

The new resolution gives the U.S. and other countries the power to inspect ships going in and out of North Korea’s ports but, unfortunately, does not authorize the use of force if the target ships don’t comply. Equally bad, the inspections would need the consent of the countries where the ships are registered. This is a far weaker regime than what was initially proposed by the Donald Trump administration, which would have empowered U.S. military vessels to “use all necessary measures” to force compliance. That the language was watered down to avoid a veto from Russia or China.

The fact is, the only way to keep the Kim regime from violating UN sanctions would be a stringent naval blockade. While a full-on blockade would require a Security Council resolution, it would be possible for the U.S. to immediately start putting in place the rudiments of a comprehensive inspection regime on the high seas, which could be easily adapted over time as more allies, partners and ultimately geopolitical competitors like China and Russia can be persuaded to sign on. Indeed, the Trump administration has already been thinking along these lines.

Such a blockade would serve three key purposes: definitively cutting off North Korea’s access to oil imports from the sea; stopping Korean exports, especially textiles and seafood (which are of significant hard currency value to the regime); and ensuring that high-tech machinery and raw materials that might support Kim’s nuclear-weapons and missile programs are not allowed into the Hermit Kingdom.

While China might continue to provide such supplies across the long Chinese-North Korean land border, a naval blockade would increase pressure on Beijing to comply with existing UN sanctions, as any illegal imports would be obvious proof of Chinese violations.

Setting up a naval blockade is a tactical challenge, even for the U.S. North Korea operates commercial and military ports on its east and west coasts of the peninsula, including Nampo on the Bay of Korea and Hungnam on the Sea of Japan. It also has ports in the far northeast of the country on the edge of Russia, which has been one of Kim’s apologists on the world stage. Shutting down the entire flow of goods into and out of North Korea would significantly tax the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

But it wouldn’t be impossible. The blockade would probably be commanded and controlled tactically out of Seoul, at the headquarters of the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, Army General Vincent Brooks. (An odd legacy of the Korean War is that Brooks is also the commander of UN forces on the peninsula.) At sea, the Navy would probably operationalize the blockade under the overall tactical control of the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, which is based across the Sea of Japan in Yokosuka. The flagship of the fleet, the USS Blue Ridge, is optimized for complex combat operations and would be the seagoing base for the blockade. The fleet has a new commander, Admiral Phil Sawyer, who was brought after the collisions of two Navy destroyers, the McCain and Fitzgerald, with commercial ships this year. More here from Bloomberg.

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There is an international program to practice and plan for anything that North Korea may have in process militarily.

North Korea’s intensifying experiments appear to have prompted the Formidable Shield exercise, which is the first time that Nato allies have practised defending against incoming ballistic missiles with no prior warning in Europe.

It launched the day after the US sent bombers and fighter jets over waters east of North Korea to send a “clear message that the President has many military options to defeat any threat”.

Donald Trump appeared to threaten regime change in the country over the weekend, causing the North Korean foreign minister to accuse the President of “declaring war” in a speech at the United Nations.

American forces are leading the exercise off the coast of the Scotland, alongside troops from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) hailed Formidable Shield as “one of the most sophisticated and complex air and missile exercises ever undertaken in the UK”.

A Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer and two Type 23 frigates are being joined by 11 other ships, 10 aircraft and 3,300 personnel for the month-long exercise.

They will work together to detect, track and shoot down live anti-ship and ballistic missiles. More here.

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Earlier this month CIA Director Mike Pompeo suggested “the North Koreans have a long history of being proliferators and sharing their knowledge, their technology, their capacities around the world.”

My research has shown that North Korea is more than willing to breach sanctions to earn cash.

A checkered history

Over the years North Korea has earned millions of dollars from the export of arms and missiles, and its involvement in other illicit activities such as smuggling drugs, endangered wildlife products and counterfeit goods.

North Korean technicians allegedly assisted the Pakistanis in production of Krytrons, likely sometime in the 1990s. Krytrons are devices used to trigger the detonation of a nuclear device.

Later in the 1990s, North Korea allegedly transferred cylinders of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Pakistan, where notorious proliferator A.Q. Khan shipped them onward to Libya. UF6 is a gaseous uranium compound that’s needed to create the “highly enriched uranium” used in weapons.

The most significant case was revealed in 2007 when Israeli Air Force jets bombed a facility in Syria. The U.S. government alleges this was an “undeclared nuclear reactor,” capable of producing plutonium, that had been under construction with North Korean assistance since the late 1990s. A U.S. intelligence briefing shortly after the strike highlighted the close resemblance between the Syrian reactor and the North Korean Yongbyon reactor. It also noted evidence of unspecified “cargo” being transported from North Korea to the site in 2006.

More recently, a 2017 U.N. report alleged that North Korea had been seeking to sell Lithium-6 (Li-6), an isotope used in the production of thermonuclear weapons. The online ad that caught the attention of researchers suggested North Korea could supply 22 pounds of the substance each month from Dandong, a Chinese city on the North Korean border.

There are striking similarities between this latest case and other recent efforts by North Korea to market arms using companies “hidden in plain sight.”

The Li-6 advertisement was allegedly linked to an alias of a North Korean state arms exporter known as “Green Pine Associated Corporation.” Green Pine and associated individuals were hit with a U.N. asset freeze and travel ban in 2012. The individual named on the ad was a North Korean based in Beijing formerly listed as having diplomatic status. As was noted when the Li-6 story broke, the contact details provided with the ad were made up: The street address did not exist and the phone number didn’t work. However, prospective buyers could contact the seller through the online platform.

This case – our most recent data point – raises significant questions. Was this North Korea testing the water for future sales? Does it suggest that North Korea may be willing to sell materials and goods it can produce in surplus? Was the case an anomaly rather than representative of a trend? More here.

Mueller Obtains Search Warrant on Facebook

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Facebook sold ads for up to $100,000 each incident. Facebook is expected to send a representative to participate in a panel in a Senate hearing.

It is also important to note Russia Today, now known as RT is to formally register as a foreign agent. Sputnik News may be asked to do the same.

Related reading: FBI investigates Russian government media organizations accused of spreading propaganda in U.S.

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In part from Newsweek:

The recent news that Robert Mueller obtained a search warrant for the contents of Facebook accounts associated with Russian operatives trying to undermine the 2016 presidential election was a key turning point in our knowledge of his investigation that could transform the scope of the inquiry and the legal strategy of the people in the special counsel’s sights.

Before news of the Facebook search warrant broke, it appeared that Mueller was focused on several discrete areas of inquiry, such as potentially false disclosures by former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, potential tax charges and alleged obstruction of justice related to President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey. Mueller’s warrant tells us that the special counsel is closing in on specific foreigners who tried to undermine our democracy, that he’s serious about going after Russian interference and he is far enough along to convince a federal judge that he has good evidence of such a crime. Read the full article here.

Deeper Dive

The Hill: The American public should be furious about the recent revelations regarding Russian manipulation of social media. What the public should not be is surprised. Although exploitation of cyber venues may be a new twist, it is just another chapter in an old story.

For the better part of a century, Russia (including its Soviet predecessor), Soviet proxies, as well as other countries have attempted to exploit wedge issues and social unrest to interfere with U.S. internal politics. These countries’ objectives are likely twofold: driving policies toward a desired outcome and forcing the United States to focus inward, distracting it from international developments.

From the 1930s onward, the Soviet Union and its Russian successor have consistently exploited divisions in American society to Moscow’s advantage. Moscow, starting with its Popular Front strategy in the mid-1930s, has insinuated its proxies into grievance-driven domestic coalitions.

 

These ranged from the Great Depression’s disenfranchised, to the anti-nuclear and pro-peace crowds. More recently, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Russia attempted to co-opt populists on both ends of the ideological spectrum by facilitating both the Occupy movement, via the Russian television network RT, and the far right, members of which have looked to Vladimir Putin as an exemplar of traditional values.

In addition to efforts at co-optation of mass movements, the Soviet Union attempted to inflame tensions within American society. In the 1960s, Soviet officials skulked around Capitol Hill, querying offices on a variety of issues including the dynamics of the civil rights movement.

For instance, one official specifically wanted to know about which civil rights leaders had been excluded from a White House meeting. This collection activity probably indicated Moscow’s desire to get smarter on a hot-button topic, which it could then exploit through an “active measures” campaign.

The civil rights issue came full circle when, in 1980, the Soviets surfaced a forgery which purported to show the U.S. government as using the CIA against African-Americans.

Cuba, a Soviet satellite, pursued similar disruptions against the United States. The Cuban government viewed American minorities as a constituency that Havana could incite to create mayhem on U.S. soil. Fidel Castro, himself, suggested that he could prompt a race riot at a time of his choosing.

Furthermore, Cuba arguably attempted to weaponize criminality against the United States when, in 1980, it seeded 8,000 criminals into the Mariel boatlift’s refugee population.

Given Venezuela’s status as a protégé of Cuba, it is hardly surprising that Caracas, under Hugo Chavez, sought to exploit socioeconomic tensions by distributing subsidized heating oil for low-income Americans as a propaganda ploy.

The Soviet/Russian-perpetrated and inspired attempts to exploit divisive U.S. political issues is notable but hardly unique to Moscow and its minions. China, during the 1960s, courted U.S. Maoist-inspired groups, including the Revolutionary Union, that embraced militancy.

More recently, the Chinese government, known for keeping a tight rein on social media, nevertheless seemed to let its WeChat platform off the leash to stir up rallies against the New York Police Department in 2016.

This history of foreign-sponsored disruption suggests that U.S. adversaries and competitors are sufficiently knowledgeable about the tensions within American society to effectively exploit them. The jury is out on whether Washington is paying similar attention.

Both the Church and Pike investigations of American intelligence in the mid-1970s produced skittishness about looking too closely at domestic actors, as indicated by the guidelines issued by Attorney General Levi, in 1976, regarding domestic security investigations.

Such trepidation about identifying dangerous domestic dynamics appears to persist, if the outraged reaction to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 report on right-wing extremism is any indication. Is it possible that risk-aversion has become willful blindness?

Social media may be a new front in foreign exploitation of tensions in the United States, but the underlying concept of exacerbating divisions and inciting conflict on American soil is a timeworn strategy.

Although Russia is the perpetrator of current interest, it is not alone in its effort to disrupt American politics through the sowing of dissent and division.

For Washington to anticipate (and, hopefully, deter) future, foreign-sponsored attacks on the public’s perceptions, it must ensure that it is aware of the vulnerabilities inherent to the domestic setting that U.S. adversaries and competitors may manipulate to their advantage.

Darren E. Tromblay served as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. intelligence community for more than a decade and is the author of the forthcoming book, “Foreign Influence on U.S. Policymaking: How Adversaries and Allies Manipulate and Marginalize the American Electorate,”

 

Citizenship for Sale in U.S and EU, the Golden Ticket

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In the United States, with a starting number such as $500,000, you can buy a passport and with just a little more you can advance to citizenship under the EB-5 visa program. Swell huh? It has been going on for years and even Senator Dianne Feinstein has an issue with it. So, where is President Trump on the matter? Crickets…..

In February of this year, Senator Grassley and Feinstein introduced legislation to stop the EB-5 abuse.

The EB-5 program is inherently flawed,” Feinstein said in a joint statement with Grassley on Friday. “It says that U.S. citizenship is for sale. It is wrong to have a special pathway to citizenship for the wealthy while millions wait in line for visas.”

Roughly 10,000 EB-5 visas are awarded each year, with more than 85 percent going to Chinese investors in 2014, according to a study by Savills Studley, a real estate services firm. The program, begun in 1990 to stimulate the economy, has turned into a convenient way for wealthy Chinese citizens to become permanent U.S. residents and later bring over their family members. More here.

The Chinese, the Ukrainians and the Russians, all oligarchs are the largest exploiters of the program and most of these oligarchs are corrupt, paying for speedy processes with dirty money.

We know there are multiple investigations going on inside the DC Beltway regarding Russian interference and rightly so. Both Democrats and Republicans have some complicity in foreign collaboration.

In March of this year, this site published an extensive summary of Russian relations with people in the Trump camp as well as with Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Few take a look at Secretary Wilbur Ross and his Cyprus connections. Cyprus is a location where abuse and corruption is as normal as breathing. One interesting person is Dmitry Rybolovlev, who happens to know Donald Trump as well as Wilbur Ross.

Beyond paying for a speedy process to obtain a passport or citizenship, there is also yet another method and that is money laundering illicit funds through U.S. real estate purchases where the buyer’s name is not listed if cash is paid. You dont say…..yup. This site published a summary of such activities in July of 2014.

So, while we have examined the issue in the United States and in Cyprus, it is the same for the European Union.

Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs suspected of corruption are among hundreds who have acquired EU passports under the “golden visa” program – a bourgeois shortcut to European citizenship in exchange for cash investments, the Guardian reported Sunday.

A list of recipients seen by The Guardian includes “prominent businesspeople and individuals with considerable political influence.”

The paper claims that Cyprus alone has made over $US 4 billion selling passports to international oligarchs, “granting them the right to live and work throughout Europe,” completely legally.

However, Cyprus is not alone. “The Golden Visa program for Spain, Portugal, Malta, Greece and Cyprus are the most prominent. Bulgaria and Hungary offer residency and citizenship by investment in Europe through government bonds,” the Golden Visa website states.

The BBC reported about this kind of purchasable citizenship three years ago.

“Just like you diversify an investment portfolio, you want to diversity your passport portfolio,” investment expert Christian Kalin, told the BBC.

The list of individuals who have received Cypriot citizenship includes Bashar al-Asad’s cousin, who was previously placed under American sanctions because of allegations he benefited from corruption. It also includes a former member of the Russian parliament and the founder of Ukraine’s largest bank.

According to Global Witness, an international NGO dedicated to exposing global corruption, global visas have the potential to give applicants fleeing persecution a “get out of jail for free card.”

Portuguese MEP, Ana Gomes, said golden visas are an immoral way to grant citizenship.

“I’m not against individual member states granting citizenship or residence to someone who would make a very special contribution to the country, be it in arts or science, or even in investment. But granting, not selling,” said Gomes.

Gomes also questioned the secrecy of obtaining golden visas. If they’re legal, why is it so hard to see who has them, asked Gomes.

The European Parliament will be debating the legality of golden visas in light of the leak, The Guardian reported.

So, for the leaders of respective countries, the definition of citizenship and the spirit of that loyalty means nothing when it comes to money, dirty money.

Perhaps we should be pushing harder for the Grassley/Feinstein legislation at a minimum….what say you?