The EB-5 Visa program, which provides a fast track to green cards for wealthy foreigners who are willing to invest large sums of money in the American economy, is back in the news this week. An unlikely duo of senators – one Republican and one Democrat – are submitting legislation to tighten the program guidelines and curb abuse. Let’s see how that works out.

Two leading U.S. Senators introduced legislation Wednesday night to clean up a boutique U.S. immigration program for wealthy foreigners that has repeatedly been undermined by fraud and in some cases may have been exploited by criminals, money launderers, and foreign agents looking for an easy way across the border.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Vermont Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy credited the program, known by the visa designation EB-5, for creating thousands of jobs by offering temporary residency and eventually Green Cards to foreigners who agreed to invest more than $500,000 in approved American ventures. But they also acknowledged what a two-part ABC News investigation found — that the program had become a magnet for those seeking to sidestep the scrutiny of the traditional immigration process.

“We’ve seen too many occasions where national security has been put at risk and job creation has taken a back seat,” Grassley said. “Our bill strengthens oversight, ensures greater accountability and transparency, discourages fraud, and provides a higher priority for national security.”

To be fair, the original intent of the program was based on an idea which had some appeal. It sought to identify successful foreigners looking to move to the United States and, at the same time, channel some money to American entrepreneurs through a series of “regional centers” which would serve as a sort of distribution hub for the money and the documents. The idea here was that you could identify some of the “best and the brightest” that we always talk about encouraging as prospective immigrants because the successful would be more likely to have that kind of cash to spread around. And if it boosts the economy at home, all the better.

Unfortunately there are other people aside from successful inventors, scientists and businessmen who tend to have plenty of cash to spare. They include drug cartel kingpins, human traffickers and intelligence agents from unfriendly governments who have access to their nation’s spy budget. Sorting the wheat from the chaff in these cases has clearly proven more challenging than the programs’ original authors anticipated.

Just ponying up the money didn’t equate to an instant set of immigration documents, but it certainly seems to have shortened the runway and did not require the same level of scrutiny which the rest of the people in line are supposed to face. Is this really any way to handle an already questionable immigration system? While the idea of job creation on the home front is always a popular and laudable one, this still boils down to a case of buying your way to the head of the line even if you happen to be pure as the driven snow. And if we can’t ensure that the cash carrying applicant is getting at least the same level of background checks as everyone else trying to get in, the program was set up to fail from the start.

And not to cast too many aspersions on the people trying to save it, but we’re giving out around 10,000 of these a year to create jobs at home. And a bunch of those jobs were created at a ski lodge in Vermont. The program is being fixed, in part, by Senator Patrick Leahy (D – Vermont). Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

The legislation proposes to vastly expand the authority of Homeland Security officials to investigate regional centers going forward, but shouldn’t DHS already have had any and all authority to do that already? And granting “authority” doesn’t simultaneously grant the money and resources to actually get out there and do it. The bill also expands the background checks on applicants which is great, but should be prompting the question of why we weren’t doing that in the first place. Oh, and it also ups the buy-in figure from a half million to $800K. Somehow I don’t think that cuts down on the drug kingpin participation rate.

This program is set to expire this year unless it is “fixed” and extended for yet another term. Perhaps it’s time to turn out the lights and just retire the program as an idea whose time is never going to come.