What Are Main Requirements To Be Proved For The EB-5 Program Visa?

Let us consider the investment side. When someone calls me, I tell them we would have to go over two primary issues, the first thing would be their investment or the project. The second thing would be documenting their source of funds. I would go through my process with them regarding choosing an investment and other aspects, relating to the source of funds. I would try to find out where they thought they were going to get the money to invest in the particular investment they ultimately chose.

Sometimes in the initial discussion, once I go over the client’s particular fact situation, I would tell them that the way they wanted to do it would not work because for example, they would have to show they paid taxes or that taxes were not an issue in that particular country. There are no taxes on income in certain countries; each country has its own tax issue or tax procedures and policies and laws. So if the person was not able to prove it the way they initially described it, then we would look at options to see if there was another way they could prove the source of funds.

The main requirements to be proved would be documenting the source of funds and picking an investment where either the regional center has a track record so they could look at the likelihood of the project being approved in the future because they had 5 or 10 approved in the past.

What Is The Most Common Reason For The Rejection Of An EB-5 Application?

We would need to consider this on both sides, because there are two main requirements which are the source of funds and the investment.

Let us talk about the investment side first. A number of projects have been denied on the project side because the economists for immigration have had their own rules regarding the creation of jobs, and they have been different than the economists for the regional centers. This means that if the immigration service decided that the job creation methodology did not support a number of employees they were trying to include in the project or they saw some other irregularity in the job count or some other factors, they would be able to deny the application even if the source of funds had been documented perfectly.

An applicant could have a denial based primarily on job issues from the regional center project side, because projects have been denied a number of times. This means, for example, that if it is a $50 million project, there would be a hundred investors because it would be a $900,000 investment. The person would need 100 investors to be able to arrange $50 million dollars. All the 100 investors would be denied, not just one. This happens rarely but it has happened and a number of regional centers have appealed to federal court and they were able to win quite a few of the cases.

The worst case scenario would be that the case would ultimately be denied, in which case the people would generally get all their money back. They would get their administrative fee and their investment amount in cases like that, but they would then have to start all over. Thankfully, this happens in the extreme minority of cases. The current approval percentage for I-526 petitions nationwide is over 80 percent. The person would then go on to get a conditional green card. They would have to apply through immigration if they were in the U.S and through a U.S consulate if they were outside the U.S, and either way would take another 6 to 8 months of waiting after the I-526 was approved.

The person would then get a green card for two years. In summary, the second time the person would go to immigration would be after they had a green card for two years, and that would be to remove the condition to get a permanent green card called the I-829. The percentage of approvals for that is over 90 percent, which is an extremely high figure for approvals.

Let us take the example of the regional center to explain common reasons for rejections. Regarding the source of funds, the person might face a refusal if immigration did not believe the person had connected the dots to document the source of funds. There are no statistics of the denials so we cannot really say how many are for source of funds and how many are from the regional center part, we just know that there are not a lot of either.

For more information on Qualifying For EB-5 Visa Program, a free initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you’re seeking by calling (310) 477-3000 today.