Direct Foreign Investment and North-South Trade: Uneven Development or Convergent Growth?

Gentrification’s racial consequences are garnering increased attention as the process advances into majority–minority urban neighborhoods. This study examines the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program’s implementation in Brooklyn, New York to ground these trends in policies through which gentrification is promoted, histories of racism and uneven development against which they are unfolding, and their disparate impacts on Black communities. While the program purports to use foreign investment to promote job growth in high unemployment areas, its financing of multimillion and billion-dollar development projects facilitates the displacement of longtime residents of the very places the initiative was designed to improve. Central Brooklyn and its outlying areas, home to one of the largest contiguous Black communities in the United States, are host to numerous EB-5 projects that have failed to produce sustainable job growth for existing residents and heightened the growing crisis of unaffordability. My analysis shows how EB-5 projects have enabled investors to use distressed areas disproportionately inhabited by poor and working-class Black communities to qualify for funding, while redistributing benefits upward to wealthy developers and affluent residents and consumers. Ultimately, the EB-5 program and other neoliberal, colorblind urban development policies exacerbate existing racial inequalities in the organization and operation of urban space.

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Direct Foreign Investment and Economic Development in Latin America: Perspectives for the Future

Journal of Latin American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022216x00014772 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 21 (1-2) ◽

pp. 221-239 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Eva Paus

Keyword(s):

Economic Growth ◽

Latin American ◽

Foreign Investment ◽

Debt Crisis ◽

Direct Foreign Investment ◽

Bank Lending ◽

Economic Growth And Development ◽

International Bank ◽

The Future ◽

Latin American Countries

Since 1982, most Latin American countries have witnessed slow economic growth and a persistent net transfer of funds to the rest of the world as a result of sharply reduced inflows of private international bank lending and large debt payment obligations. Against this background direct foreign investment (DFI) has received increasing attention as one important element in overcoming the present stagnation-cum-debt crisis as well as in contributing to renewed economic growth. This article explores the possible contributions of DFI to the future economic growth and development of the region.1

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