Any investor will always have concerns over the safety of their investment.  When that investment is the key to your chosen future, however, safety becomes a very subjective term.  In the case of EB-5 investment, safety takes on a very unique life of its own, and often leads to investors going to extremes rather than considering the best balance between investment safety and immigration qualification.

Not uncommonly, and really not surprisingly, people who are looking to immigrate through the EB-5 will do one of two things; they either

•    Focus intently on the investment potential at the expense of attending to the visa implications of the project, often assuming that the one will take care of the other, or they

•    Focus intently on the visa implications without attending to the business end of their investment.

At least on the surface there are fairly obvious repercussions of either practice.  Potentially, you could end up with a great return on investment and never gain visa approval, collecting on your investment while still living in your home country, or you could gain that visa approval and be here in the States and see almost no return on your investment.  Even these are not the worst things that could happen, though.  It is just as possible that, without the right level of thorough due diligence, you could lose all your invested monies and not qualify for a visa because the project failed when there were no jobs created.  We’ve already discussed the possibility that a poorly planned and executed investment could gain you conditional status, but not full green card status.  Having your green card revoked at the two-year mark is a very real possibility, too, if that job creation component cannot be solidified.

When you are talking in terms of investment safety with the EB-5 program, you have to consider it from different angles.  One angle is the amount of risk that the investment itself carries—that is why your advisor will go through the proposed business plan thoroughly, as well as all claims and documentation to make sure everything makes good business sense. The safety of your EB-5 investment is something that needs to be handled carefully, and with a perspective of balance.  On the one hand, there is no 100% safe investment, because all investments must carry some risk in order to qualify for visa approval.  On the other hand, that is not a reason to choose a risky investment project—the CIS expects a reasonable amount of risk, and a reasonable amount of safety as well.

Determining investment safety and risk goes beyond the business or investment plan, though.  It also requires due diligence in terms of how prospective fund recipients will be chosen, and/or who those fund recipients are (if already known).  This will give an indication as to the likelihood of loans and investments being paid back or their seeing a return.

The other angle that needs addressing when considering safety and choosing an EB-5 regional center investment is the safety of your money as an immigration vehicle.  You need to know that a successful project will be a qualifying EB-5 project—one that has what it takes to be approved by CIS as a green card condition.  It’s not enough for an investment to produce a return on your money, it must also meet the stringent requirements laid out by CIS.

Part and parcel to determining how safe your investment is, and how likely it is to gain you approval at both the I-526 petitioning stage and the I-829 stage, is knowing not only what happens according to plan, but also knowing what happens if things do not go accordingly.  When the unexpected happens, does the center have a plan for dealing with it?  Is there a solution that will preserve your immigration or petition status?  You need a way of determining whether or not such a plan is in place, and whether that plan is reasonably viable as well.  Again, that means more due diligence, and a lot of in-depth research.

Next we will look at: Should a regional center have a fallback plan? In the meantime, if we can answer any of your questions please contact Stephen Parnell or Andrew Bartlett at Which EB5