The first thing to be said about the weekend’s visa-peddling conference by the Kushner Cos. in China is: The administration should take it as an opportunity for a forthright policy stance.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a chief White House adviser, has recused himself from the family business. The company, which mentioned Kushner and displayed a large photo of his father-in-law at the event, has long raised money for its real estate ventures from the EB-5 program, which awards legal U.S. residency to foreign investors.

The president has a chance to get behind efforts to end the hopelessly inefficient and corruption-prone EB-5 program before it causes more embarrassment.

EB-5 began 25 years ago as a well-intentioned plan to attract international capital to the U.S. by awarding permanent residency to 10,000 foreigners per year who agreed to invest at least $500,000 into a U.S. business, creating at least 10 jobs directly or indirectly. In September 2015, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that 44,000 people, a third of them foreign investors and the rest relatives, had qualified since 1992. A disproportionate number of recent entrants come from China; their political and financial antecedents are difficult to vet, let alone to vet “extremely.”

The yield has been 77,150 full-time jobs and about $4.2 billion in investment – trivial in relation to the giant U.S. economy. Lobbyists have manipulated the program’s rules so that it favors big-city hotel, office and apartment developers, rather than depressed rural and urban zones as Congress originally intended.

Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have a bill to abolish the EB-5 program. This is a visa-giveaway program; private-sector businesses, in effect, sell them in return for low-cost financing of projects they’d probably do anyway. Ending EB-5 would be an easy step on the path to rational immigration reform.

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