Indian professionals are turning to EB-5 as decades-long green card waits make H-1Bs untenable

For much of its history, the US EB-5 (Employment-Based 5th Preference) Immigrant Investor Program was understood as a tool for the globally wealthy. Park $8 lakh in a US project, usually in infrastructure or real estate, and you have high chances of obtaining a green card. The typical applicant was an overseas investor looking for a foothold in the US. That profile is now largely obsolete, at least for Indians.

What's driving Indian participation in EB-5 today is not wealth migration but professional survival. The people now filing EB-5 applications are mid-career engineers, finance professionals and founders who have lived in the US for a decade or more, have built families, bought homes and established careers there, and are staring down an employment-based green card wait that, for Indian nationals, now stretches 40-60 yrs.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Over 70% of H-1B visa holders in the US were born in India. Yet, federal law caps the number of employment-based green cards available to nationals of any single country at 7% of the annual total. The result is a structural mismatch that no amount of individual achievement can resolve and, frankly, no policymaker has shown serious appetite to fix.


The US state department's June 2026 Visa Bulletin shows EB-2 India retrogressed to September 1, 2013, meaning USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) is currently processing applications filed over 12 yrs ago. The EB-3 queue for India sits at December 2013. At current rates, professionals filing today will not see a green card in their working lives. That should alarm anyone who believes the US benefits from retaining talented immigrants it spent years attracting.

For most of the past decade, many Indian H-1B holders accepted this as the cost of building a career in the US. Extensions were granted, employers sponsored renewals, and it was assumed that the system would eventually work. That assumption is now breaking down.

The Trump regime's approach to H-1B has introduced policy unpredictability that has accelerated decisions for professionals who previously would have waited. Layoffs across technology and professional services, sectors that employ majority of Indian H-1B holders, have exposed how precarious employer-sponsored status can be. A job loss triggers a 60-day grace period. After that, status lapses. For a family with a mortgage, children in school and a decade of US life built up, that is not an abstract risk. It's a countdown.

Most professionals are not panicking. They are calculating and redirecting. When the system you were counting on begins to feel unreliable, rational people look for alternatives. EB-5 has become that alternative. The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 changed one thing that made all the difference: it allowed applicants in the US to file for adjustment of status concurrently with their EB-5 petition, receiving work authorisation and travel permission while their case is pending.

For the first time, a US-based professional could initiate an independent immigration pathway without quitting her job, losing her status or leaving the country. Immigration became something you could pursue in parallel with the rest of your life, rather than something that required you to put your life on hold. This was a meaningful reform. It did not solve the underlying per-country backlog. But it gave people a viable exit from a system that had stopped working for them.

The response has been dramatic. Indian EB-5 filings totalled 75 in FY22. By FY25, that figure had reached 1,902, a 25x increase in 3 yrs. India now accounts for 23% of global EB-5 receipts, according to IIUSA (Invest in the USA) 2025 data.

The question a mid-career H-1B holder is now asking is straightforward: is $8 lakh invested in a USCIS-approved EB-5 project, with work authorisation in hand while the case processes, a better outcome than remaining on employer-sponsored status for an indeterminate number of additional decades? For a growing number of Indian professionals, the answer is yes. Not because EB-5 is cheap or easy. But because the alternative has become genuinely untenable.

One additional factor makes 2026 a particularly consequential year. A grandfathering provision tied to the 2022 EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act carries a September 30, 2026, deadline. Applicants who file before that date may be eligible to lock in the existing investment threshold and preserve access to certain legacy programme benefits.

The H-1B bottleneck was always going to produce this outcome eventually. A system that accepts lakhs of skilled immigrants annually, then offers the best-represented group among them a green card timeline measured in decades, was always going to push those people toward alternatives. The combination of structural backlog, policy uncertainty and a reformed EB-5 programme has made it arrive sooner than anyone anticipated. The question now is whether the professionals still waiting will act before the window closes.

The writer is founder-executive chairman, LCR Capital Partners