A sales pitch in China trying to lure wealthy investors to the U.S. is drawing renewed concerns from critics who argue the relevant visa program amounts to selling green cards.

President Donald Trump extended the so-called EB-5 program when he signed a spending bill that keeps the federal government operating through September. The very next day Nicole Kushner Meyer, sister of Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser, Jared Kushner, was pitching the program to wealthy Chinese in Beijing.

“She got the optics wrong for America, but she got the optics exactly right for China.”

“His sister giving the presentation that she did is concerning, especially since her brother is so close to the president … It’s definitely raised alarm bells,” said Chris Chmielenski, director of content and activism for NumbersUSA. “This is one of the concerns we’ve had with Jared Kushner and his closeness to the president.”

According to The Washington Post, Meyer was seeking investors for a New Jersey project managed by the Kushner family’s real estate firm. Some of the people who attended the sales pitch reportedly came away with the impression that the investment was safer because of Kushner’s role in the White House.

The company, in an email to The Post, apologized if the mention of Kushner “was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors.”

The EB-5 visa was intended to attract wealthy foreigners with the promise of green cards in order to facilitate investments in rural areas and economically distressed urban neighborhoods. A foreigner who invests $500,000 in a qualifying project can get permanent residency for himself and his immediate family.

But a number of government-sponsored studies over the years have documented fraud and abuse. The most recent case occurred in December in Idaho, where Chinese investors sued the co-owner of a company developing an underground gold mine 15 miles south of Butte, Montana. The 29 plaintiffs claim they were cheated out of at least $14.5 million.

“There are numerous, numerous, numerous instances of tens of millions of dollars missing and disappeared all over the country,” said David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

North, who has meticulously tracked the program from years, said developers often make a mockery out of the program’s stated goal of generating economic activity in distressed areas. Developers often create dubious EB-5 zones that connect low-income neighborhoods to ritzy areas where the projects are built.

In one case, he said, developers constructed a building on Wall Street in New York and qualified it as an EB-5 zone by connecting it to low-income neighborhoods in the city with little relationship to the nation’s financial capital.

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North said the timing of Meyer’s pitch and Trump signing the spending bill almost certainly is coincidence. But he said it highlights a larger problem.

“She got the optics wrong for America, but she got the optics exactly right for China,” he said.

The EB-5 is not the only immigration program continued or expanded as part of the massive spending bill. Immigration critics have complained that it includes a provision that could double the number of temporary, low-skill workers, who can enter the country for the rest of the fiscal year.

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The outgoing administration of Barack Obama had suggested raising the minimum investment required by the EB-5 visas from $500,000 to $1.3 million. North said other reforms proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and other members of Congress include increasing transparency in the program and tightening the rules to ensure that the investments actually benefit rural areas and economically struggling areas.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, who co-wrote a 2015 book on immigration, said Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the best reform would be to simply end the program. But she noted that it has strong support in both parties.

“You know, bipartisanship — especially when it comes to immigration policy — really is always the worst thing for Americans,” he said. “And you have a lot of open-borders special interests, corporate special interests, that back this immigrant investor program under the guise of creating jobs and helping out economically distressed areas.”

Malkin also expressed concerns about Kushner.

“With the Kushners directly involved and his family involved in milking this scam, it becomes much harder to persuade the White House to take the lead on doing what needs to be done and killing off the program,” she said.

LifeZette political reporter Kathryn Blackhurst contributed to this report.