EB-5 Investor Visa Program - Pathway to a US Green Card

Hi, my name is Cindy Jen. I’m a Partner in the Silicon Valley office of Fragomen.

Today I wanted to tell you a little about a case that was unusual and came to an unusual conclusion for somebody who has a pretty typical situation. It’s H-1B cap season right now while we’re recording this, and it means that a lot of people are applying for the H-1B lottery and over half of the people who apply will not be selected. In certain circumstances where people apply more than once or try a few times and are running out of time in the United States, people are looking for different options or different visa solutions and one thing I think people don’t necessarily think about is going straight to the green card. Amongst green card options there is one called the EB-5 investor visa.

It’s kind of unusual, not one people talk about all the time, but it is a vehicle to get permanent residency in the United States. The investor visa often is called the million-dollar visa but it’s a bit of a misnomer because you don’t require a million dollars to make an investment, you actually only need $500,000 to actually invest in a commercial vehicle in the United States. A commercial or business in the United States and your eligible to be sponsored for permanent residency. Investors actually sponsor themselves with their investment into a commercial activity in the United States.

So, what happened was we had a client who was actually an Indian foreign national and tried the H-1B lottery a couple of times and was running out of work authorization and status authorization in the United States. We were looking at different options and it turned out that with his parents and his family moving into the United States, he had an opportunity to collect enough capital to make an investment of $500,000 into a US company. So, he found an EB-5 vehicle, made a capital investment, and got himself sponsored for an EB-5 green card.

In less than about 1 year he was able to get permanent residency or at least conditional permanent residency for himself, his spouse, children under 21 were all able to get permanent residency and he didn’t have to win the H-1B lottery at all.

So, bypassing that whole H-1B situation, and getting permanent residency was a great solution for this individual, particularly for people from countries where other EB categories, other employment based green card categories are backlogged, like India and China. Sometimes going for an employment based green card isn’t a solution to not winning an H-1B cap because the solution is so long. There is no backlog for individuals who are born in India for EB-5 so it’s a really quick and not necessarily inexpensive, but certainly one option to get permanent residency. Another interesting solution to a common problem of missing the H-1B cap. Think about the EB-5 investor visa category.