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CLAYTON — St. Louis wants to tap more overseas capital by giving more overseas capitalists the right to live here.
Local economic development officials are applying to the State Department to put the St. Louis region on a list of places that qualify for a little-used, but increasingly popular, visa program designed to attract foreign money into the U.S.
It's called an EB-5, and it's meant for immigrant investors. The program offers permanent residency status to anyone who puts $1 million into a U.S. business, or $500,000 in areas with high jobless rates, and creates at least 10 jobs within two years.
The St. Louis County Economic Council is finalizing an application that would make St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County eligible for those sorts of investments. If approved, the EB-5 will be another tool to help woo cash that now flows elsewhere, said Economic Council President Denny Coleman.
Congress created the EB-5 program in 1990, but it got little use until recent years. The number of applications for visas nearly from 2007 to 2009, when 1,265 were approved, the State Department reports. While that's a big jump, it remains well short of the 10,000-per-year cap.
Experts who have studied EB-5 suspect the burst of interest has to do with the recession.
Tight credit markets have made domestic lending harder to come by, and high unemployment rates have pushed local economic development groups to think more creatively about generating jobs, said Muzaffar Chishti, a researcher with the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
"They always had the option, they just didn't have the incentive to do it," Chishti said.
But lately that's changed. Applications — like the St. Louis area's — to create regional EB-5 investment centers have poured into the State Department in the last year or so. The number of approved areas has jumped almost fourfold, and there are now 80 nationwide.
In the St. Louis area, proponents would like to steer the cash into startups at plant and life science incubators and into potential uses for the old Chrysler plant in Fenton. They also see huge opportunity in the region's ongoing talks with Chinese officials about an air cargo hub at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
"It's a unique opportunity to differentiate our EB-5 program," said Tim Nowak, executive director of the World Trade Center St. Louis. "It's a chance for individual Chinese investors to partner with a larger economic development program that has wide commercial interest here and strong Chinese interest."
In exchange for pumping their own money into U.S. businesses, the immigrants get permanent residency status after two years, if they meet the job creation targets.
It may sound a bit like buying their way into the country. But even 10,000 is a tiny fraction of the visas the U.S. awards to immigrants each year, Chishti notes, and they go to all sorts of people.
"We take millionaires and Nobel prize winners, and we also take low-wage workers and people whose only connection to the U.S. is a family member here," he said. "We take you because of the fire in your belly."