EB-5 asks you to put capital genuinely at risk, and at risk means it can be lost.

A new commercial enterprise is any for-profit entity formed for the ongoing conduct of lawful business, 8 CFR 204.6(e), which is not a synonym for a start-up. The standard investment is $1,050,000. It falls to $800,000 where the enterprise is principally doing business in a targeted employment area or in an infrastructure project, 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(C). A targeted employment area is a rural area, outside a metropolitan statistical area and outside any city or town of 20,000 or more, or an area of unemployment at least one hundred fifty percent of the national average. Only the standard amount is indexed: 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(C)(iii)(I) adjusts it on January 1, 2027 and every five years after, by cumulative CPI-U from January 1, 2022, rounded down to the nearest $50,000, for petitions filed on or after the adjustment date. The lower amount is set by formula at seventy-five percent of the adjusted standard amount, subclause (II), so it moves only because the standard amount moved.

At risk means the money can be lost, and that is not a figure of speech. The capital has to be placed in the enterprise and exposed to its failure. A right to have the money back on a date, a promised return, or a redemption feature means the capital is not at risk and the investment does not qualify, 8 CFR 204.6(j)(2). If the project fails, the money is gone and the immigration case is in trouble at the same moment. The ten jobs are defined too: full time means at least thirty-five working hours a week, and a qualifying employee is a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident, or another immigrant authorized to work here, 8 CFR 204.6(e) and (j)(4). It is not you, your spouse or your children, and it is not somebody working here on a nonimmigrant visa.

Permanent residence in this category is conditional for the first two years, 8 U.S.C. 1186b. To remove the conditions, Form I-829 is filed in the ninety days before the second anniversary of admission, and 8 U.S.C. 1186b(d)(1), as rewritten, asks the petition to show that you invested the requisite capital, that you created or are actively in the process of creating the employment, and that you are otherwise conforming. The older clause requiring the investment to be sustained throughout conditional residence was repealed, and a great deal of published material still recites it. What governs instead is 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(A)(i): capital expected to remain invested for not less than two years, which USCIS counts from the date it goes into the enterprise and is placed at risk rather than from admission. And 8 U.S.C. 1186b(d)(1)(B)(ii) requires the employment to be created before the third anniversary of admission, with the capital remaining invested. That anniversary is a date to put in a calendar on day one.