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The EB-5 immigrant investor category offers a direct route to U.S. permanent residence for foreign nationals who invest in a U.S. business that creates American jobs. Unlike most employment-based green cards, EB-5 requires no employer, no job offer, and no labor certification. You petition for yourself, and your spouse and unmarried children under 21 are included in your case.
Congress created EB-5 in 1990 and substantially rewrote it in the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022. Roughly 10,000 EB-5 immigrant visas are available each fiscal year, a figure that includes accompanying family members. This page is a general introduction; the pages linked below cover the detailed requirements, the Regional Center route, and real estate investments more fully.
For petitions filed on or after March 15, 2022, the minimum investment is $1,050,000, reduced to $800,000 if the enterprise is principally doing business in a targeted employment area or, for Regional Center investors, in a qualifying infrastructure project. A targeted employment area is either a rural area or an area of high unemployment, meaning at least 150 percent of the national average. These amounts are tied to inflation and are scheduled to increase on January 1, 2027 and every five years thereafter.
The money must be genuinely at risk, with a real possibility of loss and a real chance of gain. Guaranteed returns, contractual rights to repayment, and loans back from the investor to the enterprise do not count. You must also document that the capital was lawfully obtained, which in practice means tracing the funds and producing a number of years of tax filings and related records. Capital must be expected to remain invested for a set number of years.
The enterprise must create at least ten full-time positions, meaning at least 35 hours per week, for qualifying U.S. workers. Qualifying workers are U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and other work-authorized immigrants; they do not include you, your family, or anyone in nonimmigrant status. If you invest directly rather than through a Regional Center, the enterprise itself must employ those workers. Regional Center investors may count indirect and induced jobs established through accepted economic modeling, and up to 90 percent of the ten jobs may be indirect. Investors in a qualifying troubled business may rely on preserving existing jobs instead of creating new ones.
A standalone investor files a petition and takes an active role in a business he or she identifies and manages. The investor must be engaged in management, either through day-to-day responsibility or through policy formulation, so a purely passive stake will not qualify.
A Regional Center investor files a petition and pools capital in a project sponsored by an entity that USCIS has designated to promote regional economic growth. This is the more common route for investors who do not want operational responsibility, because a properly structured limited partnership interest can satisfy the management requirement through policy-making rights. It also allows indirect job counting. The Regional Center Program is currently authorized for immigrant visas through September 30, 2027, and designated centers are subject to periodic USCIS audits and annual integrity fees.
The 2022 Act reserved a share of each year's EB-5 visas for particular investments: 20 percent for rural projects, 10 percent for high-unemployment areas, and 2 percent for infrastructure projects. These reserved categories have generally remained current, which has made rural and high-unemployment projects especially attractive to nationals of backlogged countries. In the unreserved category, mainland China and India face waiting lines. Because these dates move every month, current availability should be confirmed against the Department of State Visa Bulletin before any filing strategy is fixed.
A standalone investor begins by filing a petition with evidence of the investment, the business plan, the job projections, and the lawful source of funds, etc. Filing does not itself confer any status. If you are already lawfully in the United States and a visa is available to you, you may file Form I-485 to adjust status at the same time as, during, or after the petition. Otherwise, once the petition is approved you apply for an immigrant visa abroad on Form DS-260.
On approval of adjustment or admission on the visa, you and your family become conditional permanent residents for two years. In the 90 days before the second anniversary of that date, you make a filing to show that the investment was sustained and the jobs were created or preserved. Approval removes the conditions and leaves you an unrestricted permanent resident. Time spent as a conditional resident counts toward eligibility for naturalization.
EB-5 is not a purchase of residence, and no part of it is automatic. Buying a house or an investment property does not qualify, because the category requires an active business enterprise that employs people. There is no such thing as a guaranteed EB-5 return; a guarantee would defeat the at-risk requirement. Filing a petition does not give you status or work authorization, and approval of the petition is not the end of the case. The I-829 stage, years later, is where inadequate job creation or a project that drifted from its business plan is discovered, which is why the quality of the underlying project matters as much as the paperwork.
EB-5 is not always the best fit. Nationals of treaty countries may prefer the E-2 treaty investor visa, which has no fixed dollar threshold and is renewable indefinitely, though it is a temporary status that does not lead to a green card by itself. Executives and managers of multinational companies may qualify for L-1 status and then EB-1C. Investors with strong professional credentials sometimes qualify for EB-1A or an EB-2 national interest waiver at a fraction of the cost. USCIS has also begun accepting petitions under the Gold Card program established by Executive Order 14351. Which path serves you best depends on your nationality, your funds, your timeline, and your family's circumstances.
An EB-5 case is a complex transaction, an immigration filing, and a multi-year compliance exercise at the same time, and the sums involved are substantial. The cost of getting it wrong is not measured only in filing fees. A denial or a poorly documented source of funds can cost years, and the two-year conditional residence period means a defect built into the structure at the outset may not surface until the I-829 stage, when the investor's status and capital are both on the line. Investors who select a project on the strength of a glossy offering document, without independent legal review, are the ones who most often find themselves starting over.
Antao & Chuang works with investors from the first strategic conversation through removal of conditions. That begins with an honest assessment of whether EB-5 is the right vehicle at all, or whether an E-2, L-1, EB-1, or another category would reach your goal faster or at lower cost. If EB-5 is the right choice, we help evaluate the structure of the proposed investment and the credibility of its job creation model, assess whether a Regional Center project and its designation status can support your petition, and consider whether a rural, high-unemployment, or infrastructure project can position you in a reserved visa category and shorten your wait.
Much of the work in a successful case is evidentiary. We build the source-of-funds record, including gifts, loans, business proceeds, and cross-border transfers, in the form USCIS expects, and we prepare the petition so that predictable requests for evidence are answered before they are asked. Where complications arise, and they frequently do, our role is to solve them: prior visa refusals or status violations, a child approaching the age of 21, currency-control restrictions on moving funds out of your home country, a project that changes materially after you invest, a Regional Center that is terminated or debarred, redeployment of returned capital, or job numbers that fall short of projections. We also coordinate the timing of your immigration filings with your family's schooling, travel, and business obligations, and advise on concurrent filing where it is available to you.
Above all, you are relying on judgment developed over more than thirty years of immigration practice. Rules on investment amounts, targeted employment area designations, sustainment, and visa availability have changed repeatedly, and they will change again before your case concludes. Experienced counsel anticipates those shifts, keeps your case aligned with current law, and gives you a candid view of your prospects rather than an optimistic one. Contact Antao & Chuang.