Articles Posted in Investor Visas

Short answer. Most of what our E-2 clients do is not a securities transaction at all. Buy the assets of a business, or form and actively control your own company, and no security changes hands. Buy the stock of an existing corporation and you have bought a security even at one hundred percent, but a…

Short answer. There is no franchise-specific E-2 rule. The word “franchise” does not appear anywhere in 9 FAM 402.9 or 22 C.F.R. § 41.51, so a franchised business is analyzed under exactly the same tests as any other. What the Franchise Disclosure Document gives you is evidence, and different Items carry different parts of the…

Short answer. Buying an operating business is often the strongest E-2 fact pattern available. The enterprise is already real, the financials already exist, and the purchase price supplies a clean number for the proportionality test. But four deal terms decide whether the petition works: how the acquisition is financed, whether you buy assets or stock,…

Short answer. E-2 is a renewable nonimmigrant visa. There is no minimum investment. You need a treaty passport. And it never becomes a green card on its own. EB-5 is a green card requiring $800,000 or $1,050,000, open to any nationality, and it takes years. If you hold a treaty passport, want to run the…

Short answer. No statute and no regulation sets a minimum E-2 investment. The Foreign Affairs Manual says so in terms: “No set dollar figure constitutes a minimum amount of investment to be considered ‘substantial’ for E-2 visa purposes.” What the law applies instead is a proportion, on an inverted sliding scale. The cheaper the business,…

Short answer. Nine things have to be true, and the two rules most people believe are not on the list: there is no minimum investment amount, and there is no required number of employees. Here are the nine. The rest of this post takes them one at a time. The regulation, in one paragraph 22…

Short answer. E-2 is not a dual intent category, so every renewal interview is a place where a pending immigrant petition has to be explained. E-1 and E-2 are not on the list of classifications that can travel abroad with a pending I-485 and return in status, so one trip forces a choice between abandoning…

Short answer. An E-2 owner has three realistic employment-based routes, and two of them skip labor certification entirely. EB-1C for a multinational manager or executive requires no PERM. EB-2 with a national interest waiver is a self-petition with no job offer and no ability-to-pay test. EB-3 or standard EB-2 through PERM requires your own company…

Short answer. Yes. An O-1 beneficiary cannot self-petition, but a separate legal entity that the beneficiary owns can file the petition on his behalf. Both the State Department and USCIS say so. What makes it work is governance: someone other than you has to hold real authority over your employment. No authority sets an ownership…

Short answer. As of August 25, 2026 the $100,000 payment is not being collected, because the First Circuit declined on July 24, 2026 to stay a district court order vacating it. The proclamation expires on or about September 21, 2026 by its own terms, a merits appeal is still live, and a DHS rule that…