EB5 Investors Magazine | Page 31

Total Jobs Created vs. Total EB-5 Investors The EB-5 program requires each investor to create at least 10 full-time jobs through the required investment. Professionals helping EB-5 investors should evaluate a project’s job creation report and determine whether it will create 10 jobs for every EB-5 investor. The real world is unpredictable, and it is possible that the project might not create all the jobs estimated in the job creation report. USCIS could disagree with the job creation estimates and reduce the projection or the project may not create all jobs calculated if certain assumptions in the report are not satisfied. Due to this uncertainty, projects should never seek a number of investors that would require 100 percent of the jobs estimated be created to satisfy the requirement that each investment create 10 jobs. In other words, projects should always build a jobs cushion into its offering and seek investors to account for only 80 – 85 percent of the jobs calculated in the job creation report. The purpose of this cushion is to ensure that every investor is credited with at least 10 jobs even if USCIS reduces the jobs credited to investors or fewer jobs are actually created by the project. For example, if a project is projected to create 1,000 jobs, the maximum number of EB-5 investors that should be supported would be approximately 80 to 85 (accounting for 800 – 850 of the jobs), because of the possibility that USCIS might reduce the number of jobs credited to investors or that the project ma