EB-5 does not sell a green card. An investor who commits $800,000 to a project in a Targeted Employment Area gets two years of conditional residence only after USCIS approves the petition, and keeps permanent status only if ten full-time jobs for qualifying US workers exist when Form I-829 is decided. The money stays at risk the entire time. A project that fails can consume the whole $800,000 and destroy the petition in the same collapse. What keeps the visa sale label alive is that the eligibility test is denominated in dollars rather than in degrees or employer sponsorship, and plenty of people object to that on principle.
Where the visa sale label comes from
Money is the entry test. There is no English exam and no labor certification. No employer petitions for you either. An EB-5 applicant qualifies by placing capital and by proving where that capital came from, and the second half of that sentence is where most difficult cases actually die. Anyone who calls the first half a purchase is describing the statute correctly.
Two other things feed the story. Congress has never made the Regional Center program permanent, so the industry runs from one authorization cliff to the next, which reads from the outside as a lobbying product rather than as settled policy. And for two decades before 2022, Targeted Employment Area boundaries were drawn loosely enough that towers in expensive districts qualified for the discounted minimum by chaining census tracts out to a poor neighborhood some distance away.
That complaint was accurate. Congress ended the practice in the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, published as Public Law 117-103, which moved TEA designation to the Department of Homeland Security and narrowed a high unemployment area to the census tract where the enterprise principally does business plus tracts directly adjacent to it.
What $800,000 actually obliges you to do
Four conditions sit underneath every approved case, and each one has killed petitions.
- Capital genuinely at risk. The at risk standard in 8 CFR 204.6, the regulation governing EB-5 petitions rules out guaranteed returns and redemption rights. A side letter promising your money back on a fixed date can void the whole petition.
- Ten full-time jobs. Full-time means 35 hours a week or more, in a position held by a qualifying US worker. Your spouse and children never count toward the ten.
- Lawful source of funds. Expect to document the path of every dollar, usually with five years of tax returns plus statements for each account the money passed through. A gift or a property sale brings its own evidence file. Source of funds generates more Requests for Evidence than any other part of the case.
- Two years of conditions. Form I-829, the petition to remove conditions on residence is filed in the 90 days before the second anniversary of conditional admission, and that is where job claims meet payroll records.
A purchase completes at the till. This one stays open for years.
The job count is the part critics skip
Direct EB-5 investors count only W-2 employees of the new commercial enterprise itself. Ten real people, on a real payroll, in a business that one $800,000 investment has to support. Regional Center investors get a broader count that includes indirect and induced jobs produced by an input output model such as RIMS II or IMPLAN, which is the main reason the Regional Center route dominates the market.
The 2022 Act tightened that model considerably. Jobs from construction activity lasting under two years now count for no more than 75 percent of an investor's total, and job estimates built on prospective tenant occupancy are out. USCIS sets out the methodology it will accept in Volume 6, Part G of the USCIS Policy Manual, covering immigrant investors.
Scandals that earned the coverage
Real fraud built the reputation. Offerings were sold with fabricated government approvals. Escrow accounts were drained before anything broke ground, and principals moved investor money into ventures nobody had disclosed. The SEC has litigated EB-5 cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars, and the agency states plainly that no securities offering is ever approved or endorsed by the SEC. If a marketing deck claims otherwise, that alone is your answer.
Our page on SEC crackdowns in EB-5 walks through the patterns regulators keep finding, and the program's troubled 1990s shows how old some of these problems are.
What the capital has actually financed
Hotels and apartment towers absorbed most EB-5 money through the 2010s, because urban real estate could carry the structure and sponsors knew how to sell it. Since 2022 the mix has shifted. Food processing plants and senior housing now draw the same investors, helped along by the 20 percent rural set-aside and the priority processing attached to it. Energy and hospital projects have followed.
Another 2 percent of annual EB-5 visas is reserved for public infrastructure financed through a governmental entity, a category explained in our note on EB-5 infrastructure projects and who they suit. Whether an individual deal creates the jobs it promises is a question about that deal. It says little about the program as a whole.
How the 2022 Act reframed the debate
Integrity rules replaced most of the honor system. No investor in a Regional Center project can file a petition until the center has filed Form I-956F for that specific offering, and USCIS has to approve the I-956F before any of those petitions can be approved. Annual statements go in on Form I-956G, the regional center annual statement. Principals disclose their own backgrounds on Form I-956H, and anyone paid to promote an offering registers on Form I-956K. USCIS audits each Regional Center at least once every five years and can run site visits.
An EB-5 Integrity Fund pays for that oversight, funded by annual fees of $20,000 per Regional Center, or $10,000 for centers with 20 or fewer investors in the prior year. Our summary of Regional Center audits after the RIA covers what the auditors look at and how centers fail those reviews.
Does the criticism reach your petition?
Indirectly, mostly through deadlines. Regional Center authorization currently runs to 30 September 2027, and investors who file by 30 September 2026 are grandfathered so their petitions survive a lapse. The first inflation adjustment to the $800,000 and $1,050,000 thresholds lands on 1 January 2027. Each of those dates is a lever a hostile Congress can pull, which is why the permanence argument matters to your timeline as much as to the industry's revenue.
Follow it through the debate over making EB-5 permanent and the long fight over raising the annual visa quota.
Reading the politics before you wire
Ask whether the project's Form I-956F is merely filed or actually approved, and ask to see the notice either way. Ask how many investors share your new commercial enterprise, how many jobs the economic report allocates to each of them, and what happens to your capital if the loan repays early. Then ask what the sponsor did between mid-2021 and March 2022, when Regional Center authorization lapsed and thousands of pending cases sat frozen.
Someone who says EB-5 is simply buying a visa has usually never read an I-829 denial. Someone who says the criticism is baseless has usually never read an SEC complaint. Both positions skip past the thing that decides your outcome, which is the quality of the single project you pick. For the fuller charge sheet, our page on the common criticisms of the program lays it out, and why buying US property alone gets you no green card answers the version of the myth that costs people the most money.