EB-5 projects raise money through intermediaries rather than advertising. A Regional Center in Dallas does not buy billboards in Mumbai. It signs migration agents in Ho Chi Minh City and private bankers in Dubai, who bring investors in and collect a commission for every one who funds. Since the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, those promoters have to register with USCIS on Form I-956K and disclose what they are paid. Follow that money before you read a single glossy page of any offering deck.
Who actually sells an EB-5 project
At the top sits the issuer, usually a Regional Center affiliated with a developer, which builds the offering and files Form I-956F for that specific investment. Underneath sit distribution partners: migration agencies in China, Vietnam, India and Korea, family offices across the Gulf, boutique advisory shops in Latin America. At the bottom is the person you actually meet, often a local representative with a slide deck and a WhatsApp group.
Commissions are paid by the project, not by you. On paper. In practice they come out of the same capital stack your $800,000 sits in, and in the largest markets that compensation has historically run into the tens of thousands of dollars per investor, sometimes with a share of the interest the new commercial enterprise earns. Ask the number out loud. An agent who will not answer has already told you something useful.
Incentives follow those commissions in ways that are easy to predict. A migration agent who has placed investors with the same sponsor for years has a reason to keep that relationship healthy and to steer clients away from a deal that will blow up, whereas an agent who switches sponsors every quarter because the commission is a few points higher has an incentive pointing somewhere else entirely.
Much of what the industry calls marketing is business to business. Regional Centers spend far more effort educating migration agents and private client bankers than they spend reaching investors directly, which is exactly why the shape of the EB-5 ecosystem matters to your outcome.
What the 2022 Act forced into the open
Before 2022 nobody had to tell you any of this. RIA rewrote the disclosure regime around promotion, and the paperwork it created is public in a way the old private arrangements were not.
- Form I-956K. Direct and third-party promoters, including foreign migration agents, must register with USCIS on Form I-956K. A Regional Center paying an unregistered promoter is exposed.
- Written compensation disclosure. The investor is entitled to know what a promoter receives in connection with the investment.
- Form I-956H. Principals of the Regional Center and of the new commercial enterprise attest to their bona fides. Certain criminal convictions and securities violations bar a person from involvement outright.
- Form I-956G. An annual statement covering capital deployment and job creation progress, among other reporting.
None of this makes a project good. What it does is put the lie in writing, where a regulator or a court can find it later.
Securities law sits on top of immigration law
An EB-5 interest is a security. Most offerings rely on exemptions under Regulation D or Regulation S, and the Form D notice filed with the SEC is a notice, nothing more. The commission keeps a standing warning that no offering is ever approved or endorsed by the SEC. A deck implying otherwise should end the conversation on the spot.
Two other claims deserve particular suspicion. "USCIS approved project" usually means an I-956F is on file, or that an exemplar has been approved for the offering, which tells you something real about the documents and nothing at all about whether the hotel gets built. Learn what an exemplar approval actually covers before you let that phrase reassure you.
The second is worse. "Guaranteed return" or "principal protected" contradicts the at-risk requirement in 8 CFR 204.6. A written promise that your capital cannot be lost is a promise capable of sinking the very petition it was made to support.
Claims that appear in nearly every deck
- Job cushion. A model showing 14 or 18 countable jobs per investor against the required 10. Ask what that number becomes if the project delivers 70 percent of budgeted spending, because the multiplier runs on dollars spent.
- Set-aside speed. Rural qualification is genuinely valuable, thanks to the 20 percent reservation and statutory priority processing. It is also the most aggressively argued TEA claim in the market.
- Track record. Counts of approved I-526 and I-526E petitions mean far less than counts of approved I-829 petitions and of investors who actually received their capital back.
- Escrow. Read when the money is released. Release before the I-956F has been filed for your offering is a real risk that gets glossed over in presentations.
- Return. EB-5 capital is priced for the green card rather than for yield, so the interest an investor sees is nominal by design. Anything advertised in double digits should prompt a hard look at where that cash is supposed to come from.
Red flags that should end the meeting
- Any guarantee of a green card. Nobody can give one.
- "SEC approved" or "government backed". Neither phrase means anything.
- Urgency built on the 30 September 2026 grandfathering date and used to stop you reading documents.
- Refusal to hand over the private placement memorandum, the loan or equity agreement and the economic impact report.
- An agent who will not disclose their commission or confirm their I-956K registration.
- A free immigration attorney chosen and paid by the project. You want your own EB-5 lawyer, paid by you.
- Marketing that quotes the Regional Center's designation date as though it were project approval.
The USCIS page on common immigration scams is worth ten minutes before any meeting.
Questions that get past the sales deck
- Has Form I-956F been filed for this exact offering, on what date, and what is the receipt number?
- What is the total EB-5 raise, how much is funded today, and what happens if the raise never closes?
- Where does EB-5 capital sit in the stack, and how much senior debt ranks ahead of it?
- How much developer equity is genuinely at risk alongside my money?
- Who pays my immigration attorney, and who introduced them?
- What is the promoter's compensation, in dollars?
- What is the redeployment policy if the loan repays before my conditions are removed?
- How many investors in prior offerings have had I-829 petitions approved, and how many have been repaid?
Write the answers down. A sponsor who answers in writing is a different counterparty from one who answers over a video call and then forgets.
Where marketing ends and diligence begins
Marketing is built to make a decision feel obvious. Diligence is built to make it feel uncomfortable, which is the correct feeling when $800,000 leaves your account for five to eight years. A serious diligence file on one offering runs to hundreds of pages, and it will include the private placement memorandum, the operating agreement of the new commercial enterprise, the loan or equity documents between that enterprise and the job creating entity, the economic impact report together with the spending assumptions behind its multipliers, the sponsor's record on prior raises, and the permit status of the real property. Read it. Twice, if the offering is the one you intend to fund. Budget for an independent immigration attorney and, on a large raise, a securities lawyer who reads the offering documents for you. That expense belongs in the real cost of an EB-5 case, alongside the administrative fee that most projects charge on top of the investment.
Choosing between sponsored deals and running your own business is the decision underneath all of this, and the marketing you see is shaped by which side of that line a firm sells on. Read how Regional Center and direct EB-5 compare on risk before you let a brochure decide it for you.