Golden visas in Portugal and Greece beat EB-5 on price and on speed, and that gap is real rather than marketing. EB-5 wins on what the status is worth once you hold it. A green card is permanent residence for the investor plus a spouse and unmarried children under 21. It carries the right to work anywhere in the country for any employer, with no sponsor and no work permit to renew. After five years it opens a route to US citizenship.
Everything below is the detail behind that trade.
Which programs actually compete for EB-5 money
Portugal is the benchmark. Its residence by investment route dropped the real estate option in 2023, leaving a fund subscription of EUR 500,000 as the main path, and the physical presence requirement is counted in days per year rather than months. Greece raised its property threshold in 2024 to EUR 800,000 in the most sought after areas, up from EUR 250,000, with a lower figure applying elsewhere. The United Arab Emirates issues a ten year renewable golden visa with no citizenship attached, alongside a corporate tax of 9 percent introduced in 2023. Caribbean citizenship programs sit at the far end of the spectrum, where the participating states agreed a price floor of USD 200,000 in 2024 and the money buys a passport rather than a place to build a life.
Several competitors have simply left the field. Britain closed its Tier 1 Investor visa in February 2022. Ireland shut its Immigrant Investor Program in 2023. Canada abolished the federal Immigrant Investor Program back in 2014 and has never rebuilt it at national level. In 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Malta's citizenship by investment scheme breached EU law, which narrowed the choice again.
The direction of travel is one sided. Programs close or get more expensive, and they rarely get cheaper.
Compare the status before you compare the price
EUR 500,000 in a Portuguese fund and $800,000 in a US project describe different products. A Portuguese permit lets you live in Portugal and travel within Schengen. It does not let your son take a job in California. A green card does exactly that, and permanent residents can be hired by any employer without hunting for a visa category, while also qualifying for federal student aid available to certain non-citizens, which for a family putting two children through a state university is worth more each year than most brochures admit.
Citizenship marks the deeper difference. Five years of permanent residence, including the two conditional years, makes an EB-5 investor eligible to apply for naturalization as a US citizen. European programs advertise comparable timelines, and some deliver, though the residence you must serve for citizenship is far heavier than the residence you must serve to keep the permit. Portugal expects a language exam. Malta's shortcut just lost in court.
Where EB-5 loses badly
Time is the honest weakness. Roughly 10,000 EB-5 visas become available each fiscal year including spouses and children, with a per country ceiling near 7 percent, and demand from a handful of countries has repeatedly exceeded that ceiling. An investor born in mainland China or India can wait years for a visa number in the unreserved category while a Portuguese fund investor receives a permit in months. Check adjudication data on the USCIS case processing times tool before believing any timeline a promoter quotes, and read our explainer on the EB-5 backlog and retrogression for how country caps interact with the reserved categories.
Set-asides are the partial answer. The 2022 reforms reserved 20 percent of the annual supply for rural projects and another 10 percent for high unemployment areas. A further 2 percent goes to infrastructure. Those reserved categories have moved quickly for precisely the nationalities stuck everywhere else, which is why sponsors have crowded the market with rural offerings since the reforms passed.
The tax bill the brochures leave out
A US permanent resident is taxed on worldwide income from the first day of residence. For a family that still owns an operating business at home, this is the point where the comparison genuinely turns against EB-5. Work through the IRS material on determining an individual's tax residency status and the substantial presence test for counting days in the US with an accountant before anyone signs a subscription agreement. Foreign accounts get reported as well, with an FBAR due once the aggregate balance of your offshore accounts passes $10,000 at any moment in the year. A Portuguese or Greek permit holder who spends a week a year in country usually stays outside that net entirely.
What the 2022 reforms changed in response
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 was partly a competitiveness bill. It authorized the regional center program through 30 September 2027 and created the reserved visa categories described above. It also allowed applicants already inside the United States in a valid status to file for adjustment of status at the same time as the petition.
Concurrent filing is the quiet advantage no European program can match. An F-1 student or an H-1B holder files the petition and the green card application together, then works and travels on interim documents while both sit in the queue, which removes the employer dependency that pushes so many skilled migrants out of the country. Two more dates matter here. A petition filed by 30 September 2026 keeps its processing rights even if program authorization lapses, and the minimum amounts of $800,000 and $1,050,000 are due for their first inflation adjustment on 1 January 2027. Our page on how legislative change moved EB-5 demand traces the market response.
Checking a sponsor instead of reading reviews
Investors searching a regional center by name, Golden Gate Global for example, usually find very little independent commentary. Much of what looks like a review is written by an agent earning a commission on the referral, and the rest is the sponsor's own material rewritten. Verify against the record instead.
- Project approvals. How many Form I-956F project applications has the sponsor had approved, and for which specific projects?
- Completed cases. How many of its investors have reached I-829 approval, and on which deals?
- Repayments. Has capital actually gone back to earlier investors, or has it only been promised?
- Trouble. Any terminated projects, any litigation, any missed job targets that the sponsor volunteers before you ask.
So is the green card worth the premium?
For a family that intends to live in the United States, yes, and the margin is not close. Work rights for the children alone justify the difference. For an investor who wants a European base with light tax entanglement, a Portuguese or Greek permit is the rational purchase and EB-5 is an expensive way to buy the wrong thing. Decide which of those two you are before wiring anything, because escrow release is where the decision becomes final. Our page on European investors who picked the US over EU options shows how that call gets made in practice.