The programme

Immigrant Investor Pilot Program

Also called Pilot Program, Section 610 program.

The Immigrant Investor Pilot Program is the original name of what is now the EB-5 Regional Center Program: the 1992 experiment that set aside 300 EB-5 visas a year for five years for investors in designated regional centers, and the name that 8 CFR 204.6(m) still carries today even though the section it rests on was repealed in 2022.

What it decides

Congress created it in section 610 of Public Law 102-395, the appropriations act approved on 6 October 1992, printed at 106 Stat. 1874 under the heading Pilot Immigration Program. Section 610(a) required a set-aside of EB-5 visas for a program built around a regional center promoting economic growth. Section 610(b) fixed that set-aside at 300 visas a year for five years. Section 610(c) let those investors use reasonable methodologies to count jobs created indirectly through revenues from increased exports, which is how indirect job counting entered EB-5 at all. Section 610 outlived the pilot label by three decades until section 103(a) of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 repealed it outright and rebuilt the program in 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(E). The regulation was never rewritten, so a reader who opens 8 CFR 204.6(m) today finds the retired name, a scope paragraph saying the program exists solely under section 610, and an allocation still capped at 300 visas for the five fiscal years beginning 1 October 1993. Read it as history, not as current law.

Governed by Section 610 of Public Law 102-395, 106 Stat. 1828, 1874, approved 6 October 1992, read from the govinfo Statutes at Large scan STATUTE-106-Pg1828; section 103(a) of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, Division BB of Public Law 117-103, read from the govinfo enrolled text PLAW-117publ103; 8 CFR 204.6(m)(1) Scope, (m)(2) Number of immigrant visas allocated and (m)(3) Requirements for regional centers. The eCFR is authoritative for the regulation's wording but is stale on its statutory basis: 204.6(m)(1) still points at a section of law that no longer exists.

Where this is explained properly

Pages here that go into immigrant investor pilot program rather than mentioning it.

Related terms

Regional Center ProgramThe Regional Center Program is the branch of EB-5 under which an investor files through a designated regional center and may count indirectly created jobs toward the ten-job requirement, and it is authorized through 30 September 2027.
Regional centerA regional center is an economic unit, public or private, that USCIS has designated to sponsor pooled EB-5 investment within a defined, contiguous and limited geographic area, and it is the only route on which a petition may count indirect and induced jobs.
8 CFR 204.68 CFR 204.6 is the EB-5 regulation, and it still supplies the working definitions of employee, full-time employment and troubled business, but the text printed in the Code of Federal Regulations today is the 2019 version a court vacated, and USCIS applies the pre-2019 wording instead.
EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 is Division BB of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, Public Law 117-103, approved on 15 March 2022, and it rewrote the EB-5 category in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Indirect jobsIndirect jobs are positions created elsewhere in the economy by a project's spending, estimated with an economic model rather than counted from a payroll, and available only to regional center investors. They may fill at most nine of the ten jobs each investor must create.

Checked against primary sources on 10 August 2026. Back to the glossary