A Senate discussion draft that would rewrite the rules of the EB-5 investor visa programme is circulating among immigration lawyers and regional centers in Washington — and while it would keep the programme alive for five more years, it would also make the green-card-through-investment route noticeably harder: 15 jobs per investor instead of 10, and capital kept at risk for 40 months instead of two years.

Source: IMI Daily

The text is titled the EB-5 Recommitment to Integrity and Transparency Act — RITA for short. It was prepared by the Senate Legislative Counsel and is dated November 12, 2026. It carries no bill number and names no sponsor, and it is not law: nothing in it changes any current EB-5 requirement unless and until Congress passes it and the President signs it, according to IMI Daily, EB-5 Policy and EB5Investors.com, three specialist outlets that have reviewed the draft.

Immigration attorney Mona Shah, managing partner of Mona Shah & Associates, told IMI Daily that she regards the draft as an initiative of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and co-authored the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA), which this draft would amend. That attribution is Shah's assessment — the draft itself names no sponsor, and EB-5 Policy says it does not treat the attribution as established.

What the draft would change

Under the draft, the Regional Center Program — the pooled-investment route used by most EB-5 investors — would be reauthorized through September 30, 2032, five years beyond its current expiry of September 30, 2027. The filing cutoff that protects petitions against a future programme lapse would move from September 30, 2026 to June 30, 2032, meaning petitions filed before that date would keep being processed even if authorization later expired.

The jobs increase is the sharpest economic change. Raising the requirement by half cuts the number of investors a project can accept by a third: as IMI Daily's worked example shows, a development whose economic model supports 600 jobs can take 60 investors today but only 40 under the draft — and at the $800,000 minimum for targeted employment areas, the amount such a project could raise would fall from $48 million to $32 million. Regional center investors may count indirect jobs, estimated through economic models, toward as much as 90% of the requirement; direct, standalone investors cannot — which is why Shah calls the increase workable for regional center projects but difficult for direct ones.

The 40-month sustainment clock would also start later than many investors expect: only once the investor's entire capital is inside the new commercial enterprise with a binding obligation to the job-creating entity. Partial funding would not start the clock. The minimum investment amounts themselves — $800,000 in targeted employment areas and $1.05 million elsewhere — are untouched, but inflation adjustments after the first one, due January 1, 2027, would come every three years instead of every five, putting the next adjustment in 2030. Rural (20%) and high-unemployment (10%) visa reservations stay the same, so the unreserved pool narrows from 68% to 65%.

Tighter checks on the money itself

The integrity sections would widen official scrutiny of where EB-5 money comes from and how it moves. The Department of Homeland Security would gain express power to request updated financial records from an investor, a spouse or dependents at any time before the Form I-829 — the petition that removes conditions on residence — is decided, so approval of the first petition would no longer close the source-of-funds file. Investors who moved money through a third-party currency exchanger would have to show the exchanger's own funds were lawful and that it is a legitimate money service business, and capital would have to travel through a regulated financial institution. Regional centers and project entities would be barred from lending investors money, directly or indirectly, to help them meet the minimum.

Promoters and migration agents — a channel through which many Punjabi and other Indian investors reach EB-5 — would face the most personal change: every promoter would have to put his or her name and USCIS registration number on the investor's Form I-526 or I-526E, and the regional center or project entity behind a promoter could face sanctions for the promoter's missing disclosure, actions or misrepresentations. Shah predicts the promoter provisions 'will bite' and will put some agents off being named on petitions. Oversight would widen in parallel: at least two public USCIS engagement meetings a year, quarterly filing and enforcement data broken down by nationality and regional center, a Government Accountability Office report within 30 months, and implementing rules from DHS within 270 days without the usual notice-and-comment period.

Section 8: the clause investors already in the system fear most

The draft's final clause, Section 8, applies its amendments — and those of the 2022 RIA — to every investor, promoter and entity 'without regard to the date on which such entities filed, petitioned, or started business.' No transition rule or exemption for pending cases appears in the provisions the three outlets reviewed. Read literally, that would subject investors with petitions already pending to the 15-job and 40-month requirements even though they invested under 10 jobs and two years — and some could not comply after the fact: an investor already repaid after two years cannot go back into the project, and a finished development cannot invent extra jobs. EB5Investors.com cautions that the draft does not expressly reopen approved petitions and that its real reach is unsettled; Shah's advice is that existing investors should read Section 8 closely, because the extended lapse protection guards against a programme shutdown, not against new eligibility rules.

Why December matters

No date has been set for the draft's public release or formal introduction. Shah told IMI Daily the plan is to attach it to a must-pass bill — most obviously the funding measure Congress must pass before federal funding runs out on December 11 — before the new Congress takes over; lawmakers returned November 9 for a five-week lame-duck session. EB-5 has usually been renewed exactly this way, riding a spending bill, and the RIA itself became law inside the March 2022 omnibus after a standalone bill failed and the programme lapsed for nearly nine months. Missing the December window would not kill EB-5, which is authorized until September 30, 2027 — but a draft not enacted this year would have to start again in a new Congress, and Grassley's Judiciary Committee chairmanship ends with this one.

Two changes arrive regardless of what Congress does: new USCIS filing fees apply from November 30, and the first inflation adjustment to the minimum investment follows on January 1, 2027. For Punjabi families weighing the EB-5 route — and for investors from India already in regional center queues — the practical position today is unchanged law (10 jobs, two-year sustainment, programme authorized to 2027) plus a live warning: if RITA moves in December in anything like its current form, both new and, through Section 8, possibly pending cases would face a materially higher bar. Anyone with a pending petition should take the Section 8 question to their own immigration counsel now, not after a funding bill passes.