- Wednesday, March 12, 2025
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced that the EB-5 visa category for Indian green card applicants has retrogressed due to heavy overall demand
By: India Weekly
THE US visa bulletin for April 2025 shows that Indian applicants availing of green cards under the EB-5 visa programme will have to wait longer.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Monday (10) announced that the EB-5 visa category for Indian green card applicants has retrogressed by over two years and is now set at November 1, 2019.
For Chinese applicants, it is even longer at January 22, 2014, while for other countries it is current.
The bulletin provides a timeline for when green card applicants can submit their applications and when they may expect a decision. It includes two key sections – dates for filing and final action dates.
Dates of filing indicate when applicants can submit their immigrant visa or adjustment of status applications.
Final action dates projects when applications may be approved, leading to permanent residency.
The bulletin cites increased demand and visa usage as the reason for an increase in waiting period for applicants from India and China.
There has also been a surge in applicants worldwide and this has added to the backlog. The bulletin warned that if the demand keeps growing, it may affect applicants from other countries too.
The “EB-5” immigrant investor visa programme allows foreign investors of large sums of money that create or preserve US jobs to become permanent residents.
The programme was created by the Congress in 1990 to “stimulate the US economy through job creation and capital investment by foreign investors,” according to the USCIS website.
The Trump administration had recently announced plans to replace the programme with a ‘Gold card‘, which would provide green cards to investors willing to pay $5 million to the US government.
Trump said sales of the new visa, a high-price version of the traditional green card, would bring in job creators and could be used to reduce the US national deficit.
