Is Citizenship by investment dead in Argentina?

[CraigM]

It is actually remarkable just how they grew over the years. Chinatown before was almost nothing. And when I first moved to Buenos Aires in 2002 after the Corralito there weren't many Chinese grocery stores. There wasn't much diversity unless you went over to Flores. But it grew fairly quickly. I would start seeing Chinese grocery stores pop up all over the city. I asked one of them who owns them. And it was really interesting.

An owner/investor would start one, then he would have someone they trusted from China implicitly come and run the store. They would keep doing this so that once they got experience, then that person would start their store and bring someone they trusted and so on and so on. They are all over the city.

They are very hard working, dedicated and know numbers very well. Really they just want to be the last man standing so you do have to be wonderl if you have a wave of them coming in, especially the wealthy ones how it will turn out. Look in the USA, they don't even allow Chinese electric cars because they can't compete with them on price/quality.

That's really interesting Mike. It's also the kind of immigration you want to see, working hard, starting businesses and pursuing the dream. CBI programs were designed for that. It wasn't so expensive that you had to be rich but you needed the means to get invested in your citizenship and not be a burden on social programs.

The kind of immigration you don't want (and Canada got in hordes) is massive wealth coming and swamping your communities, schools and housing markets. They contribute very little to the communities they live in, and being careful here I'll just say that many of them are not good citizens... at all.

 

[CraigM]

It's interesting if you go to Mexico you will see a lot of BYD and even Argentina is starting to see them but doubt US can compete with them without slapping on 100% import taxes. That says everything.

I think that 100% tariff is more to do with the level of govt subsidy in China. Japanese and Korean cars are superb but they're properly competitive and just pay the standard 15%.