Immigration for Investors: The EB-5 Program After the Reform and Integrity Act
You have the capital to invest a substantial sum in the United States, and you want to know whether EB-5 will get you — and your family — a green card. That is the right question. It is also a harder question than the glossy brochures from regional centers let on.
I have handled this process from both ends. I have shepherded two regional-center investors through approval without ever receiving a Request for Evidence, which is unusual and, in my experience, almost entirely a function of how thoroughly the source-of-funds package is built on the front end. I have also watched prospective clients get pulled toward projects they should have walked away from. The program works. But it demands that you understand the law as it actually is now, and that you go into a regional-center investment with your eyes open.
This guide explains the EB-5 immigrant investor program as it stands in 2026, after the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA). It is written for people who are evaluating EB-5 as a real option, not for people who want a 30,000-foot overview of every investment visa.
What EB-5 Gives You — and What It Doesn’t
EB-5 is an immigrant visa category. A successful EB-5 applicant becomes a lawful permanent resident of the United States, with a green card for the investor, the investor’s spouse, and unmarried children under 21. After five years as a permanent resident, the investor is eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship.
That is what EB-5 gives you.
What EB-5 does not give you is a guaranteed return on your money. More on that below — it is the single most misunderstood feature of the program, and it is the feature that drives most of the bad decisions I see investors make.
The Two Investment Amounts That Matter
The RIA, signed into law on March 15, 2022, replaced the investment thresholds that had governed EB-5 for years. The amounts now are:
- $800,000 if the investment is in a Targeted Employment Area (TEA) or an approved infrastructure project.
- $1,050,000 if the investment is anywhere else.
These are the statutory minimums. They have been unchanged since March 2022, and they will remain in effect through the end of 2026. The RIA requires USCIS to adjust both amounts for cumulative inflation every five years, with the first adjustment effective January 1, 2027. The projected TEA minimum after that adjustment is approximately $900,000, based on Consumer Price Index data through early 2025.
If you see any older figure — $500,000, $1 million, $1.8 million — it is obsolete. Those were pre-RIA numbers, and they are not the law today.
What a “TEA” Actually Is, and Why the Set-Asides Matter
A Targeted Employment Area is either a rural area (outside a Metropolitan Statistical Area, and outside any city of 20,000 or more) or a high-unemployment area (a census tract, or combination of contiguous tracts, with an unemployment rate at least 150% of the national average). Under the RIA, USCIS — not the investor, and not the state — designates high-unemployment TEAs. Rural TEAs are established by showing the location qualifies under the statutory definition.
The RIA did something more important than just preserve the lower $800,000 threshold for TEAs. It carved out reserved blocks of EB-5 visas, called set-asides:
- 20% of annual EB-5 visas for rural TEA investments
- 10% for high-unemployment TEA investments
- 2% for approved infrastructure projects
These set-aside visas are separated from the remaining 68% of visas (the “unreserved” category). That separation matters enormously for any investor who is not willing to wait five or more years for a green card. As of the April 2026 Visa Bulletin, every set-aside category is current for every country of chargeability, while the unreserved category has a cutoff date of May 1, 2022 for applicants from India and September 1, 2016 for applicants from China. Vietnam, which has moved in and out of backlog in recent bulletins, is current again in the unreserved category at the moment but the Department of State has cautioned that retrogression could return later in the fiscal year.
In plain terms: if you are from India or China, a rural TEA project is not just a lower-dollar option — it is very likely the only way to get to a green card in a reasonable timeframe.
The rural set-aside has another practical advantage. USCIS has given priority processing to rural I-526E petitions. Approvals in the rural category have been averaging about five to nine months in 2025, against two years or more for the unreserved category.
Two Ways In: Direct Investment vs. Regional Center
Within employment-based immigration, EB-5 law recognizes two paths.
Direct investment. The investor buys, builds, or substantially expands a U.S. business — often a single business the investor will actually run — and the investor’s capital must create at least 10 full-time jobs for U.S. workers. This is what most people picture when they imagine “immigration through investment.”
Regional-center investment. The investor buys a limited-partnership interest in a project sponsored by a USCIS-designated regional center. The regional center packages the investor’s capital with other EB-5 investors’ capital to finance a larger project — typically a commercial real estate development, a hotel, or a senior-living facility. The regional center is responsible for creating the jobs, and the investor can count both direct and indirect jobs (jobs that flow through the economic model) toward the 10-job requirement.
The overwhelming majority of EB-5 investors choose the regional-center path. Congress reauthorized the Regional Center Program through September 30, 2027, as part of the RIA, and the set-aside categories are only available through regional-center (and, for direct investment, rural-area) projects.
Why Direct Investment Is Harder Than It Looks
Some investors are drawn to direct investment because they want to actually run the business — a Montana restaurant, a body shop, a small manufacturer. That instinct is understandable, but the job-creation math is hard.
The RIA and the underlying regulations require 10 full-time positions. Full-time equivalents count — 25 half-time employees work out to 12.5 FTEs — but the jobs must be permanent. The regulations treat a position as permanent if it lasts at least two years when created. The jobs must be created by the investment, attributable to the new commercial enterprise, and sustained long enough to support the I-829 removal-of-conditions petition at the end of the two-year conditional-residence period.
In practice, that means a direct-investment EB-5 business needs headroom. If you think you need 10 employees, you probably need 12 to be safe. If the business has to contract for any reason — and two years is a long time in any small business — an employer staffing to the bare minimum can fall below 10 FTEs and damage the I-829 petition.
There is also a dynamic nobody talks about until they have lived through it. An EB-5 investor running the business is uniquely vulnerable at about the eighteen-month mark. Employees who understand that the investor’s green card depends on continuing employment have leverage they would not have in any other context. I have not seen this produce outright blackmail, but I have seen employees become distinctly more assertive about working conditions and compensation when they figure out what is at stake. A prudent investor plans for this.
And there is the Montana-specific problem. Most of the state is rural TEA territory — eligible for the $800,000 threshold. But the places where most investors want to invest, like Bozeman and the Big Sky corridor, are not. Gallatin County is a Metropolitan Statistical Area, and Bozeman itself is well above the 20,000-population threshold for rural designation. The unemployment rate in and around Bozeman has been running in the low single digits — well below 150% of the national average, so the high-unemployment TEA designation doesn’t help either. An investor who wants to open a business in that part of Montana, outside a qualifying rural area, is looking at a $1,050,000 minimum investment, not $800,000.
Why Regional-Center Investment Is the Default
For most investors, a regional-center investment is less about business ambition and more about immigration economics. The investor is buying a limited-partnership unit, putting capital at risk, and letting someone else run the project. The job creation is the project developer’s problem, not the investor’s.
What the investor is actually buying, at the level where immigration counsel lives, is a source-of-funds-driven I-526E petition. That is where the bulk of the legal work happens.
Source of Funds: The Real Work
USCIS reviews every EB-5 investor’s lawful source of funds de novo — even in a regional-center case where dozens of investors are participating in the same project. The project may have been approved a hundred times over; your source-of-funds package is still looked at fresh.
There are, realistically, only two ways to build a clean source-of-funds file.
A documented capital gain. The investor bought something — real estate, a business, a stake in a closely held company, publicly traded securities — at a lower price, and sold it later at a higher price. The paper trail shows the acquisition, the holding period, the sale, the proceeds flowing into a traceable account, and then the transfer into the EB-5 investment. This is the cleanest way, because the gain is a discrete, documented event.
A high earner with years of tax returns. The investor has, for at least five years, earned substantially more than the family’s cost of living, and has been able to set aside the excess into savings. The paper trail here is income tax returns, payroll records, bank statements, and a narrative that ties the accumulation to the investment. This is harder than the capital gain route, because it requires documenting a pattern rather than an event, but it works.
Virtually anything else — inheritance, gifts, loans secured by the investor’s assets — can be made to work, but each comes with its own documentation burden. Gifts require the donor’s source-of-funds package. Loans require collateral documentation and terms that satisfy the regulations. Inheritance requires probate records and, often, the decedent’s own source documentation.
Two practical observations. First, investors frequently underestimate how far back the tracing has to go. USCIS wants to see lawful source, not just a lawful-looking bank balance. If the ultimate source is a business the investor sold in 2012, we need records from 2012 that show the business existed, earned money lawfully, and was sold for the amount reflected in the proceeds. Second, currency controls in the investor’s home country — particularly China, but also India, Vietnam, Iran, and others — add a second dimension to the paperwork: the funds must have moved legally out of the home country as well as have been earned legally in the first place.
Source of funds is the single largest factor in whether a petition is approved on the first filing or ends up in an RFE cycle that adds a year to the timeline. It is where I spend the most time.
The Three-Stage Process
A regional-center EB-5 case unfolds across three documents:
Stage 1: Form I-526E. The investor files Form I-526E (Immigrant Petition by Regional Center Investor). This is the petition that establishes the investor has lawfully made a qualifying investment in an approved project. USCIS adjudicates the I-526E; on approval, a visa number becomes available (subject to priority-date rules).
Stage 2: Conditional permanent residence. Once the I-526E is approved and a visa is available, the investor either adjusts status in the United States (Form I-485) or consular-processes abroad. The result, either way, is a two-year conditional green card — indistinguishable from a regular green card in daily life, but with an expiration clock.
Stage 3: Form I-829. Within the 90-day window before the second anniversary of conditional residence, the investor files Form I-829 (Petition by Investor to Remove Conditions). This petition must show that the capital was sustained in the new commercial enterprise and that the requisite 10 full-time jobs were created (or, under some circumstances, can reasonably be expected to be created). I-829 approval produces the unconditional green card.
A direct-investment case follows the same three stages, substituting Form I-526 for Form I-526E.
Concurrent Filing: The Quiet Game-Changer
The single most useful RIA provision for an investor already in the United States is the availability of concurrent filing. If an investor is physically present in the United States in a valid nonimmigrant status, and a visa number is immediately available in his or her EB-5 category, the I-526E petition and the I-485 adjustment-of-status application can be filed at the same time.
Filing concurrently unlocks two benefits immediately: the investor can request an Employment Authorization Document and Advance Parole. With EAD and AP in hand, the investor can work for any employer in the United States and can travel internationally while the I-526E is adjudicating. In practical terms, a family that arrived as visitors can, within a few months of filing, be lawfully working and traveling as if they already had green cards.
Two important caveats. First, the immigrant-intent problem is real. Filing an EB-5 case within days of arrival as a visitor invites a USCIS finding of preconceived intent — a ground for denial of adjustment. There is no magic number, but filing a few weeks after arrival, without a pattern of prior misrepresentation, is very different from filing on day two. Second, concurrent filing requires a valid nonimmigrant status at the time of filing. The Visa Waiver Program (ESTA) does not qualify. A B-1 or B-2 visa, an F-1, an H-1B, an L-1, an O-1, a TN — these all work. An ESTA admission does not.
The second practical point about concurrent filing: retrogression. As of the April 2026 Visa Bulletin, all three set-aside categories are current for all countries. If that remains true at the time of filing, investors from India, China, and elsewhere can file concurrently on a rural or high-unemployment TEA case. When retrogression hits the set-aside categories — and it will, for India and China, sooner rather than later — concurrent filing stops being available and the I-485 has to wait for a visa number.
Choosing a Regional Center: Three Questions That Matter
I am not a financial advisor, and I do not evaluate the underlying economics of regional-center investments. My clients are sophisticated enough to read a private placement memorandum. What I tell them is that the financial soundness of the investment and the immigration soundness of the investment are two different questions, and you need to evaluate both.
On the immigration side, I use three tests. If a regional center cannot answer all three of them clearly, I move on.
First: What is the I-526E approval rate for investors in this regional center? Not projected. Not “we expect.” What has USCIS actually done with prior I-526E petitions from investors in this project or its predecessors? An established regional center with a real track record should be able to quantify this. Vague answers are a red flag.
Second: What is the I-829 approval rate? This is the deeper test, and it is where a lot of regional centers fail. An I-526E approval only means the project is facially credible and the investor’s capital is in place. An I-829 approval means the jobs were actually created, the capital was sustained, and the conditional residence converts to unconditional. A regional center that has produced many I-526E approvals but few I-829 approvals — or cannot tell you what the I-829 rate is — is selling a first-half-of-the-story product.
Third: What is the capital-return rate, and how long does it take? An EB-5 investment is a loan with lousy terms, and every investor should understand that going in. But a well-run regional center does, in fact, return investor capital once the project milestones are met — typically three, five, or sometimes seven years after investment. Ask for a history of capital returns. Ask to speak to investors whose capital has been returned. If the regional center cannot produce either, the investor is not evaluating a regional center — the investor is hoping.
Few regional centers pass all three tests. That’s fine — the ones that do are the ones worth looking at.
The “Interest-Free Loan Plus Fees” Framing
Every investor who has committed money to a regional-center project has, by law, put their capital “at risk.” USCIS is explicit that the investment must be a genuine equity investment, not a disguised loan with a guaranteed return. Any regional center that promises a specific return of principal, or guarantees a rate of return, is either misrepresenting the product or positioning the investment in a way that USCIS is likely to reject.
The way I explain this to prospective clients is bluntly: you are making an interest-free loan to a regional center for approximately five years, and you are paying fees on top of it. The “interest-free” part is regulatory — there cannot be a guarantee. The “fees” part is economic.
Regional-center sale fees are substantial. In the current market, they commonly run in the $50,000 to $75,000 range per investor unit. A portion of that fee is, by industry convention, a commission paid to whoever brought the investor to the project. Attorneys cannot collect that commission — it is a broker-dealer function, and immigration lawyers are not licensed as investment advisors. I am not an exception. What I can do, and what I do, is negotiate with the regional center to rebate the commission portion directly to the investor. That rebate is typically triggered by the filing of the I-526E petition.
Attorney fees for handling the immigration portion — the I-526E petition, the concurrent I-485 for the investor and spouse, and the follow-on I-829 two years later — vary by case complexity. For a straightforward regional-center case with a clean source-of-funds story, fees for the I-526E and a concurrent I-485 for a couple typically run in the $25,000 to $35,000 range; the I-829 is billed separately when that stage arrives.
All told, a regional-center investor should plan on spending approximately $100,000 in fees — regional-center sale fees plus attorney fees — in addition to the $800,000 capital contribution. And should plan on getting the $800,000 back in roughly five years, not before, and not guaranteed.
The Integrity Regime: What the RIA Actually Changed
Before the RIA, EB-5 had a credibility problem. The paradigmatic case is Jay Peak, a Vermont ski-resort regional center where the SEC in 2016 alleged that principals Ariel Quiros and William Stenger had raised more than $350 million from EB-5 investors and misappropriated approximately $200 million of it, including $50 million Quiros used for personal expenses. Quiros ultimately pled guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and concealing material facts from a federal agency, and was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison. Stenger also pled guilty. The State of Vermont later settled with defrauded investors for $16.5 million. For many of those investors, the settlement recovered pennies on the dollar.
I had multiple conversations with Jay Peak’s representatives at AILA conferences over the years. They were polished, confident, and armed with impressive-looking investment materials. They were also, as it turned out, running what had significant Ponzi-scheme characteristics. The investors who applied my three-test framework would have had a hard time getting satisfactory answers on the capital-return history, because there was almost no capital being returned.
The RIA was, in large part, a response to Jay Peak and similar frauds. The integrity provisions now include:
- Mandatory background checks of every principal and key person at a regional center, new commercial enterprise, and job-creating entity, with ongoing disclosure obligations.
- Fund administration or audit requirement. Every new commercial enterprise must either retain an independent fund administrator, who co-signs on transfers of investor capital, or submit to annual third-party audits. The administrator or auditor is there to make sure the money actually goes where the offering documents say it goes.
- The EB-5 Integrity Fund. Every I-526E filing carries an integrity fee (currently $1,000 per investor), funding USCIS enforcement activities, site visits, and audits.
- Periodic USCIS audits of regional centers, required at least every five years.
- Investor protection on termination. If a regional center is terminated or debarred, the RIA provides mechanisms for investor capital protection that did not exist before.
These provisions do not make EB-5 safe. They make EB-5 safer, and they give a diligent investor more tools to evaluate a project than existed in the pre-RIA era. A regional center unable or unwilling to produce its fund-administration arrangements or audit history in 2026 should be treated the way its answers suggest: skeptically.
Filing Fees and the Current Cost of Filing
USCIS filing fees for EB-5 have been in flux. A 2024 fee rule raised the I-526E filing fee from $3,675 to $11,160, an increase of more than 200%. In November 2025, a federal court held that USCIS had raised EB-5 fees without completing the fee study the RIA requires, and ordered the fees reverted. As of the date of this guide, the I-526E filing fee is back to $3,675, with a separate $1,000 EB-5 Integrity Fund fee paid with the petition. DHS has proposed a new fee rule to replace the reverted one; public comment on that proposal closed in December 2025, and the rule was not yet final as this article was published.
Adjustment-of-status and related fees are separate and depend on the number of family members included. An investor planning a concurrent filing should budget several thousand dollars in USCIS fees per family member on top of the I-526E filing.
EB-5 vs. E-2: Not the Same, But a Real Choice
A significant number of clients who start out asking about EB-5 do not have $800,000 to put into a TEA investment, and have no way to raise it. For those clients, EB-5 is not the conversation. The conversation is about the E-2 Treaty Investor visa, which is a nonimmigrant visa — not a green card — but which has its own advantages.
The legal differences are real. E-2 is nonimmigrant status: it is renewable indefinitely so long as the business continues to qualify, but it does not lead directly to lawful permanent residence. EB-5 is an immigrant visa: it produces a green card.
The practical reality for some clients is different. A client who operates a successful E-2 business for decades has lived in the United States, educated children in the United States, traveled freely in and out of the United States, and, in many cases, died as an E-2 holder without ever needing or wanting permanent residence. From that client’s perspective, the E-2 did what the client needed it to do. It is not EB-5. But it is not nothing, and for a client with $250,000 rather than $900,000 to deploy, it may be the better answer. An honest evaluation of investor immigration options has to put both on the table.
For clients where the capital clearly exists to do EB-5, the calculus changes: the certainty of permanent residence, the option to naturalize, and the ability to work for any employer (not just the investor’s own business) make EB-5 the stronger path. But the EB-5 framework should be compared against E-2, not simply assumed to be the right answer.
For Canadian nationals specifically, our dedicated E-2 guide for Canadians covers employee, dependent, and consulate-specific considerations in more depth.
EB-5 is structurally different from E-2 — see our treatment of when E-2 is the wrong vehicle for a passive investor for the active-investment doctrine that makes the comparison meaningful.
The 2019 Filings, Mandamus, and a Word About Patience
A lot of EB-5 clients who filed in the last years of the pre-RIA program — particularly in 2019, as rumors of reform circulated — ended up waiting far longer than they anticipated. Petitions that should have been adjudicated in 18 to 24 months instead languished for five years. Many of those investors turned to mandamus litigation in federal court to compel USCIS to act, and mandamus actions were often successful, not because the merits were close, but because the delays were indefensible under the standards governing agency inaction.
The post-RIA system is materially faster, particularly for the rural set-aside, where priority processing has produced rural I-526E approvals in five to nine months. Non-rural unreserved cases still take longer, and retrogression for Chinese and Indian investors in the unreserved category means that some approved I-526Es sit for years before a visa number is available.
The honest expectation for a well-documented rural-TEA case filed today by a non-backlogged investor: approximately 12 months from filing to conditional green card, sometimes less. Two more years to I-829 eligibility. One more year, roughly, to I-829 adjudication. From initial filing to unconditional green card is a four- to five-year journey under the best of circumstances.
How We Work on EB-5 Cases
Our role in an EB-5 case is narrow and specific. We do not sell regional-center units, we do not receive commissions on investments, and we do not evaluate the financial soundness of projects. We maintain a working knowledge of regional centers that have long approval track records, solid I-829 histories, and demonstrable capital-return patterns, and we can give clients a candid sense of which projects meet our three-test immigration framework. The financial analysis of any particular project is the investor’s responsibility, working with licensed financial professionals.
What we do is build the I-526E petition — especially the source-of-funds documentation — so that it goes in clean and comes out without an RFE. We handle the concurrent I-485 filings for the investor and family members, the work-authorization and advance-parole applications, and the I-829 removal of conditions two years after conditional residence is granted. For a client who ends up needing E-2 status as a bridge or an alternative, we handle that too.
If you are evaluating EB-5 for yourself and your family, the first step is an initial strategy consultation, not a conversation about projects. It is about your situation: your country of chargeability, your current immigration status (if you are already in the United States), the origin and documentability of the capital you intend to invest, and the geography of where you want to live. Those inputs determine which version of EB-5 is realistic for you, and whether EB-5 is even the right tool in the first place. Contact our office to start that conversation.
