Five parties get paid when you wire $800,000 into an EB-5 project, and at most one of them owes you a duty of loyalty. The developer wants cheap capital for twenty-four to sixty months. The Regional Center earns sponsorship fees. The overseas migration agent earns a commission on your signature. A US-based promoter may earn a second commission on the same investor. Your own immigration attorney, hired by you and paid by you, is the one participant whose obligation runs to you alone.
That asymmetry explains most of what goes wrong in this industry.
Who pays whom in an EB-5 deal
Capital travels one way and advice travels the other. Your investment goes into the new commercial enterprise, the NCE, which lends or contributes the pooled money to the job creating entity that builds and staffs the project. Your administrative fee travels somewhere else entirely. Quoted at anywhere from roughly $50,000 to $70,000 in current offerings, that fee is the pot from which the industry pays itself.
Out of it come the securities lawyer who drafted the private placement memorandum and the economist who produced the job creation report. The fund administrator and the escrow agent are paid from it too. So is the agent who introduced you, which is the payment nobody mentions during the introduction.
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 dragged this into daylight. Sponsors must now disclose the compensation paid to promoters, and promoters themselves must register with USCIS on Form I-956K, the registration for direct and third-party promoters. Ask to see the registration. An agent who has never heard of the form is operating outside the current rules.
The Regional Center sponsors the deal and earns from it
A Regional Center is an entity USCIS has designated on Form I-956 to sponsor pooled EB-5 investments and count indirect jobs. For each offering it files Form I-956F for approval of an investment in a commercial enterprise, describing the project and the economic methodology behind its job count. Fee arrangements go into the same filing. Every year the center files Form I-956G. Its principals are vetted on Form I-956H, and it pays an annual EB-5 Integrity Fund fee of $20,000, or $10,000 if it had 20 or fewer investors in the prior fiscal year.
None of that makes the sponsor your fiduciary. Open the operating agreement or limited partnership agreement of the NCE and you will usually find that the manager or general partner is an affiliate of the sponsor, holding broad discretion, sheltered by wide exculpation language, and empowered to amend the loan terms with the borrower without asking the investors for a vote. All of it is legal. All of it also decides what happens to you when the project runs eighteen months late.
Read that document twice.
One timing point saves investors months. Once the center has filed the I-956F for your offering, you may file Form I-526E, the petition by a regional center investor, and lock your priority date. USCIS must approve the I-956F before your petition can be approved, and waiting for that approval before filing simply costs you queue position. Our explainer on exemplar approval and Form I-956F covers what the approval does and does not guarantee.
Migration agents and the commission nobody quotes you
In China, Vietnam, India, Korea and Taiwan, the migration agent is usually the first person an investor meets. Agents run seminars, translate documents, assemble source of funds files and shepherd families through years of process. Some are excellent at it.
The project pays their commission out of its own budget. Per investor, that payment has historically run into the tens of thousands of dollars, which means the shortlist an agent presents to a family in Ho Chi Minh City or Hyderabad is shaped in part by which sponsors pay best, a question with no necessary connection to which project will actually produce ten jobs per investor. Nothing about the arrangement is illegal. Everything about it argues for verifying the deal somewhere else.
Ask two things. What is your commission on this offering, and which other projects did you consider? A straight answer to the first question is a decent proxy for honesty about the rest. We cover the mechanics in more depth on how overseas EB-5 agents work and what they charge.
Two kinds of lawyer sit at this table
Securities counsel works for the issuer. That firm writes the private placement memorandum and the subscription agreement. It drafts the NCE governing documents and prepares the I-956F package. Its client is the sponsor. The job is to disclose every risk in language that will protect the sponsor on the day one of those risks actually arrives, which is why the document you find hardest to read is the one drafted most carefully.
Immigration counsel is yours. That lawyer builds the source of funds record and files the I-526E. Adjustment of status or consular processing follows, then a return two years later for Form I-829 to remove conditions on residence. Fees are usually flat, commonly somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000 for the petition stage, with the I-829 billed separately.
Watch for three arrangements. A single firm drafting the offering and also representing the investors in it. A "free" attorney whose fee is quietly paid by the project. An attorney chosen for you by the migration agent who earns a commission on the same deal. All three are common, and all three are disclosed somewhere in the paperwork if you read far enough. Each one leaves the person reviewing your documents with a financial stake in your saying yes. Whether you need separate counsel at all is a fair question, and we answer it in what EB-5 immigration attorneys actually do.
Where the economist and the fund administrator fit
The economist is the quiet center of gravity in a Regional Center deal. Using an input-output model such as RIMS II or IMPLAN, that report converts construction spending and projected operating revenue into a job total. Your green card depends on those numbers surviving contact with reality at the I-829 stage, which is two years after you receive conditional residence and long after everyone who sold you the deal has moved on to the next raise. Look hard at the cushion. A report projecting exactly ten jobs per investor leaves no room for a single delayed construction draw.
Direct investors get none of that. Under 8 CFR 204.6, the regulation governing EB-5 petitions, a qualifying position must be full time, and combinations of part-time positions do not count even when the hours add up. A job-sharing arrangement, where two or more employees split one full time position, does count.
Fund administration is the newer piece. The 2022 statute pushed money movement out of pure sponsor control by requiring an independent fund administrator or an annual audit of the NCE by a licensed accountant. Escrow agents hold subscriptions until a defined release condition. Read that condition closely, because a release triggered by subscription rather than by the I-956F filing gives away most of the protection escrow is supposed to provide.
Above all of them sits the USCIS Immigrant Investor Program Office, with the Department of State controlling visa numbers. Our guide to how USCIS and the State Department run the EB-5 process sets out that division of labor step by step.
Ask these four questions before you sign anything
- Who is paying you, and how much? Ask the agent. Then ask the lawyer, on a separate day. Written answers only.
- Which offerings did you reject for me, and why? An advisor who has never rejected anything is a distributor.
- Show me the I-956F receipt for this offering. A receipt number with a date, not a reassurance.
- Who signs off on releasing my money from escrow? Then find that person's name in the escrow agreement.
No federal agency endorses an EB-5 offering, and any suggestion otherwise should end the conversation. The SEC investor alert on claims that the agency has approved an offering exists because that pitch keeps being used. USCIS approval of a project confirms it meets immigration criteria and says nothing about whether you get your money back.