Jinhee Wilde
Immigration AttorneyAs EB-5 requires an investor to invest in a new business enterprise, everything could be a new project. If you are asking which of the following projects is safer, you basically have two options: (1) a project offered by a regional center that attempts to gather few hundred or thousand investors, thus a project that has been offered for a long time and had earlier investor petitions submitted; or (2) a new project offered that will gather few dozen investors but has had no investor petitions filed. Which one is safer? This is not a simple answer. It is an accepted premise that: the larger the project, the higher chance of something going wrong. However, the problems that do arise in your project may not derail the whole thing—it depends on a variety of factors. Also, while I-526 petitions may be approved, the more important application is the Removal of Conditions application, the I-829. Because the approval of I-829 depends on creating the jobs forecasted at the I-526 stage, a larger project with more investors could present a risk of falling short on the projected number of jobs. However, this would depend on the methodology of the job creation that the project uses. Thus, each project must be reviewed separately on its own merits and there is no concrete rule of which regional center or project is better than another. There are some better questions to ask: you should look at whether the regional center choosing the project is the developer and any if any possible conflicts of interest exist; you should check if the regional center has a proven track record of doing EB-5 projects successfully; etc.
