| A federal program promised to bring foreign investment to remote parts of the country. It soon became rife with fraud.  Illustration by Álvaro Bernis Jay Peak, a ski hill situated in Vermont’s sparsely populated Northeast Kingdom, near the Canadian border, was a local favorite, frequently receiving the most snow of any resort in the East, and winning over regulars with its rugged, duct-tape-can-fix-it attitude. Then, within just a few years, the business partners running the resort built a massive indoor water park, an ice rink, a golf course, and two large hotels. And they began promising even more ambitious initiatives in the area, including the construction of a huge biotech campus nearby that would manufacture advanced medical products in the backwoods of New England and employ thousands. Funding for this frenetic development relied on the EB-5 visa program, which attempts to lure foreign money for job-creation projects in the United States, in exchange for green cards for the investors. Vermont’s politicians cheered; the local community awaited an economic windfall. And then, as Sheelah Kolhatkar reports in this week’s issue, agents from the Securities and Exchange Commission showed up in town, and everything came apart. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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