The programme
New commercial enterprise
Also called NCE, new commercial enterprise (NCE).
A new commercial enterprise, usually shortened to NCE, is the for-profit entity formed in the United States that receives the EB-5 investor's capital and gives the investor an equity stake in return, and it is the enterprise the petition is built around.
What it decides
8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(D)(vi) defines it as any for-profit organization formed in the United States for the ongoing conduct of lawful business that receives, or is established to receive, EB-5 capital, and it lists sole proprietorships, partnerships, holding companies with their wholly owned subsidiaries, joint ventures, corporations, business trusts and limited liability companies. That statutory definition governs petitions filed on or after 15 March 2022; earlier petitions are read against the regulation at 8 CFR 204.6(e). In a regional center deal the enterprise is usually a limited partnership or LLC that passes the pooled capital onward to a separate job-creating entity, so it is usually not the business that builds the project, though USCIS accepts structures in which the two are the same entity. New means established after 29 November 1990. A business that existed on or before that date still qualifies if it is purchased and then restructured or reorganized so that a new commercial enterprise results, or if the investment expands its net worth or headcount by at least 40 percent, under 8 CFR 204.6(h). Outside a regional center only directly created jobs count, and USCIS requires the enterprise, or a wholly owned subsidiary of it, to be the employer of the ten qualifying workers. Since 15 March 2022 more than one EB-5 investor may be pooled into a single enterprise only under the regional center program.
Where this is explained properly
Pages here that go into new commercial enterprise rather than mentioning it.
Related terms
- Job-creating entityA job-creating entity, or JCE, is the United States business in a regional center EB-5 deal that receives the investment capital, either straight from the investors or through the new commercial enterprise, and is responsible for creating the ten full-time jobs each investor's petition must count.
- 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.
- 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5), cited in filings as INA 203(b)(5), is the statute that creates the EB-5 category and, since the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, carries the investment amounts, the visa set-asides, the job creation caps and grandfathering in the statute itself. It runs from subparagraph (A) to subparagraph (S).
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