Material Change I’ve written extensively about the faulty legal premise girding USCIS’s material change policy.[1] Fundamentally, those articles advance a simple point: USCIS should use authority correctly in formulating its policies. This EB-5 Note on material change is more immediately practical. In the era of EB-5 backlogs, EB-5 projects and the USCIS material change policy are [...]
EB-5 Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers) brought to you by Carolyn Lee PLLC. Question 1: What is an EB-5 visa? Answer: An EB-5 visa is a U.S. immigrant (meaning U.S. permanent residency) visa. Another name for an “immigrant visa” is a “green card.” There are different green card categories, based primarily on family-based relationships or [...]
Note: This article originally published June 2017 on ilw.com just before June 14, 2017 USCIS Policy Manual Update released. Carolyn Lee PLLC is re-posting the article by popular demand. By Carolyn Lee* There is much confusion today about whether EB-5 investors’ funds must be “redeployed” if it’s repaid to the new commercial enterprise before [...]
On July 25, 2018, Kurzban, Kurzban, Weinger, Tetzeli & Pratt, P.A. filed a lawsuit against the United States challenging the way the U.S. Government counts EB-5 visas.[1] The suit can have profound consequences. If successful, the visa backlog disappears. Even without winning, the suit has the potential to galvanize stakeholders to find other solutions to [...]
Scenario: The EB-5 loan has a 5-year maturity and the note is due. The project has been successful and is completed. All the jobs have been created, sufficient for all the EB-5 investors in the project. The new commercial enterprise (NCE) fund manager would like nothing more than repay the EB-5 investors, but most are [...]
On October 30, 2018, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services updated its Policy Manual on the point of immigrant investors and debt arrangements as announced on the Policy Alert of the same date. [1] Since May 2018, there have been four EB-5 related Policy Manual revisions out of a total of ten covering all areas [...]
