All the talk right now naturally revolves around recovery and what the government can do to stimulate the economy. One recurring sentiment I’m hearing over and over again is the importance of foreigners and foreign investment to the recovery of commercial real estate. In a recent CNBC interview, Wilbur Ross and Richard LeFrak discussed just that:
Wilbur Ross: “I think you can solve a lot of the real estate problems in the U.S. if you did what Canada did a while back which said if a foreigner invests a certain amount of money in residential real estate they could get a visa, you don’t have to give them a Green Card you don’t have to give them citizenship, just a visa.”
Richard LeFrak: “I said 2 years ago you could fix the problem for no money by letting people with capital, and they have to behave of course, come here and buy a house. That could solve all the problems.”
Wilbur Ross: “And it doesn’t add anything to the federal deficit, if anything, it would help it because it would stimulate the economy.”
If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching the entire video:
The incentives don’t have to be real estate specific, I read a CNN Opinion piece this morning on the importance of entrepreneurship in job creation. We can’t even begin to think about development until we’ve recovered the nearly 7.3M jobs we’ve lost. Once again, a major driver in job recovery will be foreign immigrants who come to the U.S. and start companies. In order to incentivize immigrants to come to the U.S. and start their company here we should offer a visa for entrepreneurs. Here’s the excerpt from the piece:
Second, welcome immigrants who are job generators. We are a country of immigrants, and yet in recent years, we have made it incredibly difficult for immigrants to launch companies in the U.S. Why not create a new visa for entrepreneurs? Increasingly venture capitalists, angel investors and innovators are advocating a “start-up visa” offered to immigrant entrepreneurs who want to start a company in the United States. In 2008, nearly 40 percent of technology company founders were foreign-born; 52 percent of Silicon Valley company founders were foreign-born, including the founders of Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel, to name a few. Why chase these innovators away when we need jobs and should be hanging an “innovators wanted” sign on our front door?
What do you think? Would this solve a lot of our issues?
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