After its advent in the early 1990s, the US EB-5 immigrant investor program functioned as a way for real estate developers to raise funds from wealthy overseas investors. But the program didn’t take off until the financial crisis of 2008. When LCR Capital Partners entered the market in 2012, says its founder, Suresh Rajan, the company saw that investors needed advisors, since until that point the borrower and the lender of funds were often controlled by the same body—and investors had nowhere to turn to for investment advice. LCR “converted a US government immigration program into a standardized financial product,” he says. In this interview with the Indian business paper Mint, Rajan explains how the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 is working to squelch fraud by bad actors, speed up processing times, and make the EB-5 program more user friendly for investors interested in US green cards. He also explains how Indian investors who already live in the US may be able to get a jump on the application process, possibly reducing processing times.
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