EB-5 visa program: USCIS set to reveal investment rules for green card applicants, check details here
Investors that make the required investment in a US-based business and create or maintain ten permanent full-time jobs for eligible US workers are allowed to apply for lawful permanent residence and get a Green Card under the EB-5 visa program.
All about EB-5 visa requirement
The EB-5 visa program requires a minimum capital of $1,050,000, whereas the Targeted Employment Area needs a minimum of $8,000,000.
A federal court issued an order in a lawsuit concerning the 'sustainment period' for money invested through the EB-5 visa program.
The disputed topic was about the timeframe under which EB-5 investors can withdraw their investments and still qualify for a US green card. The court was considering a case that would have affected EB-5 investors who wanted to make America their permanent home.
Also Read: Setback for Indians? Trump's WH approves major H-1B visa overhaul, set to prioritize higher wages over lottery system
The US District Court for the District of Columbia has decided not to become involved in the current 'sustainment dispute' surrounding EB-5 investments.
It further stated that formal regulations outlining the requirements of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act will be released for public discussion by November 2025.
USCIS grants the EB-5 investor and their family members provisional permanent residence for a two-year period after they enter the country on an EB-5 immigrant visa.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) establishes the duration of probationary residence for investors.
EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA), which President Biden signed into law, removed restrictions on an investor's status as a lawful permanent resident and changed the standards for investment upkeep.
In order to understand the new legislative language, the defendant United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released instructions. The investment must be 'expected to remain invested for not less than 2 years and investors no longer needed to sustain their investment throughout their period of conditional residence,' in a bid to qualify for EB-5 classification, the USCIS said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
4 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
How One Big Private-Equity Fund Makes Its Numbers Incomprehensible
Many fund managers strive to be transparent with their financial disclosures. Others are so obstructive that they might as well be kicking sand in investors' faces. While private equity is synonymous with opacity, the tricks of the trade are taking on greater importance as the industry seeks to broaden its reach among ordinary investors. President Trump last week signed an order seeking to open up Americans' class="backlink" data-vars-page-type="story" data-vars-link-type="Manual" data-vars-anchor-text="401(k) retirement accounts">401(k) retirement accounts to private equity and other alternative investments. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) made headlines when she asked the Securities and Exchange Commission in June to investigate the way Harvard is valuing its private-equity holdings. To date, private equity has generally been the domain of institutions and high-net-worth individuals with long-term investment horizons and a high tolerance for risk and illiquidity. Less wealthy, ordinary investors have traditionally had only limited access. Their ability to participate has been growing, however, as more funds register with securities regulators and publicly disclose their financial reports. The funds may invest directly in other private-equity funds, or purchase stakes in them on the secondary market from existing investors. Such funds should, at a minimum, allow investors to see how much each private-equity holding originally cost and compare that with its latest carrying value. Some funds are making this exercise difficult. This is particularly problematic in light of recent controversies over some of the industry's valuation methods. Among the hottest flashpoints: Some funds have exploited an accounting loophole by buying stakes in other private-equity funds at big discounts on the secondary market and then marking them up immediately to their official net asset values. Sometimes the technique has resulted in gains of 1,000% or more in a single day. At many funds, such markups are at least easy to spot. The funds include clear, user-friendly tables in their financial reports that show each investment's cost, the latest fair value and the acquisition date. These data points are required disclosures under federal securities rules. Showing them alongside one another makes comparisons simple. In its latest annual report, Partners Group Private Equity (Master Fund) listed the cost figures for its private-equity investments in a footnote that spanned three pages. This is the second page of the footnote. But other funds make comparisons complicated, if not impossible, by listing the cost figures in lengthy footnotes, rather than in the main tables. The only way to determine the size of the markups is to manually match the costs for each investment (in the footnote) with the latest fair values listed on the disclosure table. Even that doesn't always for instance Partners Group Private Equity (Master Fund), which last reported almost $16 billion of net assets. It is the largest SEC-registered private-equity fund, according to Interval Fund Tracker. Individuals investing in the fund must meet certain minimum financial criteria. To exit from the fund, investors submit redemption requests during designated tender periods. The schedule of investments in the fund's latest annual report listed 1,089 individual private-equity investments in a table that included the fair value and acquisition date for each. In a footnote to that table, however, it listed 1,095 different cost figures. That is six more cost figures than there were investments. The footnote spanned three pages, single-spaced. In other words, there is no way someone reading the annual report could determine which cost figure applied to which investment—and no way to gauge which investments might have fishy markups. A review of previous reports showed the Partners Group fund sometimes had done this before. Regarding the cost-figure mismatch in the latest annual report, Partners Group spokeswoman Jenny Blinch said that 'there were a handful of investments to which the fund made follow-on investments in the same security,' and the cost figures listed for these in the footnote 'were disaggregated into the individual transactions.' After receiving questions about the practice, Blinch also said the fund plans 'to start including investment costs in the main table of the schedule of investments, alongside entry dates and current valuations.' The fund accounted for about 10% of Switzerland-based Partners Group's assets under management at year-end. A Wall Street Journal review of disclosures by other similar funds showed they use the same footnote technique. At those funds, however, it was at least possible to match costs to the corresponding investments. That is because the number of cost figures in the footnotes aligns with the number of disclosed investments. These include private-markets funds run by well-known managers such as Hamilton Lane, Franklin Resources, Coller Capital, Pantheon, Pomona and FlowStone. Ares Private Markets Fund's annual report shows cost figures in the main disclosure table, not a footnote. It bought stakes in 51 different private-equity funds on the secondary market on March 31, 2025, the last day of its fiscal year. The total cost was $330 million, and the Ares fund marked them up the same day to $377 million. The biggest percentage markup for a single investment was 57%, and the cumulative $47 million of paper gains that day amounted to 12% of the fund's total unrealized gains for the entire year. Ares ensured outsiders could at least look up those numbers. Anyone trying the same exercise with the Partners Group fund's last annual report would be stymied. Investors would be fair in suspecting that something here doesn't add up. Write to Jonathan Weil at
Hindustan Times
4 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
OpenAI's Rocky GPT-5 Rollout Shows Struggle to Remain Undisputed AI Leader
OpenAI's newest AI model , GPT-5, was supposed to cement the startup's status as the undisputed leader in the AI race. Instead, it has had a tumultuous public launch, frustrating users and prompting Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman to respond. Users have flooded social media with embarrassing examples of how the chatbot failed to answer simple math questions or accurately draw a map of North America. Others have criticized its colder tone, reminiscing about older models that OpenAI initially killed off. A new limit of 200 questions a week rankled devotees. Altman on Tuesday promised to imbue GPT-5 with a 'warmer personality,' restored a popular model after OpenAI declared it to be obsolete and introduced the capability for users to decide which kind of query they want to make. The company has learned how much users expect customization, he said in a post on X. Computing capacity has been a concern during the rollout, prompting the company to re-evaluate which users are priorities. The turbulence shows the challenge OpenAI has in selling 700 million active weekly users on new models while being constantly short on computing power, which is expensive and scarce. The rollout comes at a delicate moment for OpenAI, which is struggling to keep its lead among rivals who are aggressively going after its talent and pouring billions of dollars into AI research. Competitors such as Anthropic's Claude have surged in popularity among coders and business users. Whether GPT-5 will enable OpenAI to win over such customers remains to be seen. 'We expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once,' he said earlier on X. 'But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!' When GPT-5 was released last week, Jason Pollak, a digital-marketing specialist based in Atlanta, was excited and thought it would be a perfect expansion from GPT-4. Instead, the model feels 'bland, generic' and less like a creative thinking partner, Pollak said. Pollak pays for ChatGPT and uses it regularly to work on copy, analyze data or create custom tools. The transition from GPT-4 to GPT-5 has been frustrating, he said. 'It feels like they took the Ph.D. thing a little too seriously to prove how smart it would be,' he said. GPT-5's release came after a two-year wait in which it experienced a series of delays and setbacks, leading to speculation that either the AI startup had lost its edge or that AI development was more broadly hitting a wall. Altman dismissed those concerns on a call with reporters last week, saying the startup had found new breakthroughs. Juliette Haas, an account-strategy coordinator at a communications and crisis-management agency, primarily uses the paid version of ChatGPT for brainstorming and to complete administrative tasks such as creating a to-do list. With the release of GPT-5, she decided to revisit a business-development prompt to figure out which companies or individuals at her firm would require her support. With GPT-4, the response suggested that she build strong industry connections and emphasized the importance of relationship building. GPT-5 delivered a checklist. 'The AI treated finding distressed companies more like a data-science problem rather than understanding the fundamental considerations of relationships and timing,' said Haas. She finds that GPT-5 doesn't understand context and subtext as much as GPT-4 did, and GPT-5 delivers more 'data-driven solutions.' Jim Marsh, founder of JMC Strategic Intelligence, a consulting firm, uses the premium version of ChatGPT and has been a user since 2022. He said he is impressed with the results of GPT-5, finding that it was able to build a database of his contacts without many errors. The industry has reached a point in AI innovation where 'every release isn't going to be a magic trick,' which is perhaps why there is so much criticism about the newest model, he said. 'There's still this expectation that AI is going to quickly do more for us without us needing to be involved, and that's generally a false belief,' he said. Write to Ann-Marie Alcántara at and Berber Jin at
Indian Express
4 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Trump's takeover of DC police: Can he, why now, and is it necessary?
United States President Donald Trump has announced that he is temporarily taking control of the Washington, DC, police department, while deploying 800 National Guard troops to the city, saying the measures are needed to 'rescue' the US capital from a surge in crime. During a 78-minute news conference, Trump declared that the US government would take control of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department to address what he called 'surging crime.' 'I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,' Trump said, joined by US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will oversee the force. 'This is Liberation Day in DC, and we're going to take our capital back. We're taking it back.' 'Under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States, I'm officially invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act… and placing the DC Metropolitan and Police Department under direct federal control,' he said. He also announced the deployment of the National Guard: 'I'm deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, DC, and they're going to be allowed to do their job properly.' Trump added he intends to remove the capital's homeless population, without giving details. The 1973 law granted DC a degree of self-government, allowing residents to elect a mayor and council, while keeping certain powers with Congress and the president. The Act allows the president to take control of the police if 'special conditions of an emergency nature exist.' Trump previously threatened to do this in 2020. The president can take control for 48 hours, or up to 30 days if Congress is notified. Trump said he plans to extend the takeover beyond 48 hours. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back: 'Let me be clear. Chief Pamela Smith is the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, and its 3,100 members work under her direction. Nothing about our organisational chart has changed. And nothing in the executive order would indicate otherwise.' The US Army said 'between 100-200 soldiers will be supporting law enforcement at any given time,' handling administrative, logistics, and public safety tasks. The Guard will operate under Title 32 status — federally funded but locally controlled — and not bound by the Posse Comitatus Act. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Guard units will begin arriving this week, likely without openly carrying rifles, though weapons will be accessible. Hegseth said the Pentagon was 'prepared to bring in other National Guard units – other specialised units.' When asked about removing homeless people, Hegseth said: 'Our job is to stand alongside law enforcement.' Trump's order states that 'rising violence in the capital now urgently endangers public servants, citizens, and tourists' and disrupts government functions. It calls DC 'among the most violent jurisdictions in the United States.' The move appears linked to the August 3 assault on Edward Coristine, a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer and protege of Elon Musk. Police say 10 teenagers attacked Coristine and his partner; two 15-year-olds were arrested. Days later, Trump wrote on Truth Social: 'If DC doesn't get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run.' He added that the takeover 'should have been done a long time ago.' Mayor Bowser questioned the need for the National Guard, suggesting more funding for prosecutors would be more effective. 'It is true that those were more challenging times related to some issues. It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-COVID, but we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets, and gave our police officers more tools,' she said. According to Bowser, violent crime is now at a 30-year low. DC crime statistics show violent offences fell from 2023 to 2024, with 2025 continuing the trend: homicides down 12 per cent, assaults with dangerous weapons down 20 per cent. The FBI also reported a nationwide drop in violent crime of 4.5 per cent in 2024 compared with 2023. (With inputs from The Guardian, BBC)
