Attention: International Students EB-5 is for you!

Attention: International Students EB-5 is for you!

Second semester senior year is supposed to be both exciting and relaxing for college students. Finishing up your major, interviewing for jobs, and planning trips to Europe consume your last few months as a full-time student. But what if that trip you were planning—Europe, Asia, anywhere—was going to be permanent? At this time, international students studying in the United States are faced not only with a slow and challenging economy and job market; they are also struggling to get sponsorship for H-1 or work visas.

Consider this scenario: At age 18, you receive a student visa and decide to study in the United States. It is 2008, and while the job market is not completely awful in the U.S., you are confident that things will turn around by the time you are ready to graduate in 2012. Now, fast forward through those four years of undergrad. It is now 2012 and you are getting ready to walk across that stage. Nerves set in, because the job market has not picked up as hoped and the companies that are hiring graduates are looking to hire U.S. citizens and forego the H-1 or work visa paper process. You feel stuck. You feel helpless. You have just spent the last four years of your life networking, studying, interning, and giving everything you could to your community and now you have no choice but to leave. Wasn’t the reason you decided to study in the United States in the first place to learn as much as you could and then find a job and stay here? Your dreams are shattered.

Chicagoland Foreign Investment Group, LLC (CFIG) understands your concerns and offers you an option that will allow you obtain a U.S. Green Card within one year and restore those dreams. It is called EB-5. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) EB-5 immigrant investor program is designed to address the issues of job creation and economic development while, at the same time, providing investors with U.S. Green Cards. CFIG has been designated as a USCIS EB-5 regional center, allowing them facilitate match EB-5 qualifying projects with EB-5 investors.

The minimum investment requirement for EB-5 is $500,000 in a targeted employment area or $1,000,000 in any other area within an EB-5 regional center’s designated operating area. By investing through an EB-5 regional center, like CFIG, much of the stress investors fear is alleviated. CFIG vets projects and structures business plans to ensure EB-5 compliance. Each EB-5 investment creates 10 jobs—directly or indirectly—and helps stimulate local economies. It is this job creation that helps to stimulate the economy.

While EB-5 investors are not employed by the projects in which they invest, the EB-5 regional center’s projects are helping to stimulate the economy. A growing economy leads to increased hiring in general and increased hiring creates a more promising job market for graduating students and international students.