A green card ends employer sponsorship completely. From the day you are admitted as a permanent resident you may take a job with any US employer, work for none of them, launch a company in any state, change careers twice in a year or stop working altogether. No labor certification is filed on your behalf. No employer holds your status. No job change puts it at risk.
The limits that remain are narrow and easy to list. A few are immigration limits tied to the EB-5 investment itself. The rest apply to every permanent resident, whatever route they took.
What changes the moment you become a permanent resident
Work authorization arrives with the status. A permanent resident carries no Employment Authorization Document and renews no work permit. No employer files a thing. The card itself satisfies Form I-9 as a List A document, which takes a new hire about a minute at the front desk.
Renewal is a separate matter and a common source of panic. Once conditions come off, the card runs ten years and is replaced on Form I-90. What lapses is a piece of plastic. Status itself does not expire, though an expired card makes travel awkward and gives nervous human resources departments an excuse to delay a start date, so file well before the printed date arrives.
Before permanent residence lands, applicants adjusting status inside the United States can work on an Employment Authorization Document requested with Form I-765, filed together with Form I-485. Investors processing at a consulate abroad have no equivalent. They wait for the immigrant visa.
You also need a Social Security number to be paid lawfully. Request one on the immigrant visa application so the card follows you to your first US address, or apply afterward through the Social Security Administration.
Jobs a green card still cannot reach
Federal competitive service positions are generally restricted to US citizens, and work requiring a security clearance almost always is. Elected office is closed. Certain state and municipal roles impose citizenship requirements of their own, which surfaces most often in public safety hiring, so read the posting rather than assuming a green card clears every box.
Professional licensing is the more common obstacle, and it has nothing to do with immigration status. Physicians, attorneys, architects, engineers, accountants: each is licensed state by state, and foreign credentials rarely transfer whole. A doctor trained abroad typically needs ECFMG certification and a US residency before any state board will license them, which can add years to a career plan. Boards move slowly. Weigh licensing rules before you pick a city, because reciprocity varies enormously between states, and our comparison of where to live as a new investor goes through the trade-offs.
One warning costs people their status every year. Voting in a federal election is a crime for a non-citizen and a ground of removal. Almost nobody does it deliberately. It happens when a motor vehicle office hands over a voter registration form with the driver's license paperwork. Decline that form.
Keep the EB-5 enterprise healthy while conditions remain
Direct investors feel the management requirement in a way regional center investors do not. Under 8 CFR 204.6 the investor must be engaged in the management of the new commercial enterprise, through day to day managerial control or through policy formation. The regulation treats a limited partner holding the normal rights of a limited partner as sufficiently engaged, which is why so many deals are structured that way. An investor who bought into a direct project and then vanished into a full time job three states away should raise it with counsel early.
Capital must remain at risk for at least two years from the date it is invested. Pulling money out to seed a new venture is the quickest route to losing what the petition bought. Our guide to running an EB-5 funded business lists the payroll and tax records that Form I-829 will demand at the end of the conditional period.
Regional center investors have far more room on day one, because the jobs are produced by the project rather than by anything they do. Career choices sit outside that petition. The gap between the two structures is one of the practical arguments in our regional center versus direct comparison.
Starting a second, unrelated business
Nothing prevents a permanent resident from founding a company with no connection to the EB-5 project. The $800,000 committed to the new commercial enterprise stays committed until the sustainment period ends, and that threshold holds until the first inflation adjustment on 1 January 2027. Fresh capital brought from abroad carries its own paperwork. Foreign accounts totaling more than $10,000 at any point in the year trigger an annual FBAR, and worldwide income becomes taxable from the day residency begins, which catches people who left a dormant account open at home and assumed nobody would ever ask about it.
Why self employment brings a tax bill nobody mentions
Consulting through your own entity is common among investors whose careers were built abroad. Two details catch almost everyone. Self employment tax runs at 15.3 percent of net earnings up to the Social Security wage base, layered on top of ordinary income tax, which shocks anyone whose previous country deducted everything at source. An S corporation, meanwhile, may only have shareholders who are US citizens or resident aliens, so a permanent resident qualifies while a relative still living overseas does not.
Estimated tax is paid four times a year. Skip the payments and penalties accrue even in a year that ends with a refund.
Set the money aside monthly.
Hiring your first employee adds ordinary employer duties. Form I-9 verification for every worker. Wage and hour compliance under federal law and whichever state you operate in. Workers compensation insurance in almost every state. None of that is an immigration matter, unless you are a direct EB-5 investor whose ten jobs have to be provable on paper at the I-829 stage.
Citizenship removes the last of these limits
Five years after admission as a permanent resident, most EB-5 investors may apply to naturalize on Form N-400. The two conditional years count toward that clock, which surprises people who assume it restarts when conditions come off. Citizenship opens federal employment and clearance-dependent work, and it ends the abandonment risk that follows long stays abroad. USCIS sets out the naturalization requirements in full, and our entry on life after EB-5 covers what changes in the years between.
Nobody has to naturalize. Plenty of investors hold a green card for decades and never apply, renewing the card every ten years. The trade is a permanent tie to US tax on worldwide income against the freedom to spend six months a year elsewhere without anyone asking why, which is a real choice for a retired investor and almost no choice at all for a family whose children will grow up voting here.