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The Hongcouver | Larry Wang has helped thousands of rich Chinese get to Canada. He’s no fan of new immigration policies
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Ian Youngin Vancouver
Larry Wang has quietly helped shape modern Vancouver, though few in the city have probably heard of him - unless they used his services to get here.
As the president of one of China’s top immigration consultancies, Well Trend United, Wang has helped thousands of rich Chinese move to Canada. He says his company, which employs hundreds of consultants around China, has enjoyed two decades of success, having “risen to become one of the largest, most influential immigration consulting firms in China on the back of … Canadian immigration programmes”.
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Canada’s two largest wealth-migration vehicles were long the Federal and Quebec Immigrant Investor Programmes, which have brought about 200,000 rich newcomers since 1986. Most of them likely settled in greater Vancouver, and most have been Chinese.
But in 2012, the FIIP was frozen, then shut down last year, to be replaced by the Immigrant Investor Venture Capital pilot programme, a scheme which had only attracted six applications worldwide, as of June. The QIIP, meanwhile, last year introduced a tough set of documentation benchmarks, demanding minutiae of applicants’ sources of wealth and income, and applications are down 74 per cent.
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In short, Chinese millionaire migration to Canada is in a state of flux.
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