A policy memorandum earlier this week from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provides much-needed clarity on how the agency will treat what’s becoming a long temporal gap between an EB-5 project's completion and an investor's receipt of a green card — a gap partly driven by a continuing influx of investors from China, lawyers say.
****
Kate Kalmykov of Greenberg Traurig LLP said more clarity is needed on the question of how exactly developers can redeploy funds to new projects. She also said the memo lacked clarity on what happens to a borrower if a project is sold, and whether in that case the buyer can be assigned the loan.
"How are they going to treat deals that were structured pre-retrogession? I think the memo answers that in some ways, but not in all ways,” Kalmykov said. “It’s good that they issued the memo. They’ve left us without guidance for some time.”