The EB-5 visa program, at its core, is an investor visa program that requires its participants to create new jobs for American workers. All pooled EB-5 investments (those involving more than one immigrant investor) are required to take place through an entity known as a regional center.
Regional centers are permitted to utilize reasonable economic methodologies in order to demonstrate direct, indirect and induced job creation so the job creation required of an immigrant investor does not have to come solely from the operations phase of a developer’s project.
Job creation can come from calculations associated with qualified construction expenditures, direct construction jobs, operating revenues and other economic formulas. A simple way to look at this from a developer’s perspective is that money being spent on qualified expenditures has a job creating impact so money spent equates to jobs being created. (There are project costs that will be excluded from this formula such as land acquisition costs and other expenses that do not have a job creation impact.)