Siddharth from India

Sure. My name is Siddharth. I’m from India. I came to the U.S. in 2015 as a student to do my MBA at Duke. And post-MBA, I started working in investment banking. I was on the East Coast earlier for a couple of years, and then I moved to California. So, I’m based out of California now.

I think the reason why I arrived at the decision to go through EB-5 is that the firm that I used to work for back in 2022 had several rounds of layoffs due to the market environment, and I was a part of that unfortunate event. At the same time, my I-140 process was stalled because of this event. My employers had been in the process of sponsoring my Green Card and registering me with USCIS for that.

Unfortunately, my H-1B runs out by the end of 2023, so I needed to either (1) find a new job or (2) somehow convince people in banking that they should sponsor me for a Green Card from the get-go. Usually these things in investment banking happen only based on your good performance, and very, very few employers agree right off the bat to sponsor you for your Green Card. So, unfortunately, given what was going on in the market, it was obviously very difficult for me to find another job at that time, whether it was in banking, whether it was in tech, or any other area. And at the same time, I also needed to make sure that I stayed in the U.S. because my wife lives here as well.

She is here independently on a separate H-1B. Now, a lot of people suggested I could try to transfer myself as a dependent on her H-1B, but that would give me an H-4 designation, which does not allow me to work in the U.S. because she just started her H-1B. And she’s nowhere near the I-140 process as of now. So, from a family standpoint, from a career and just a lifestyle choice standpoint, we decided to make the U.S. our permanent home and pursue the EB-5 visa.

I looked at the EB-1 Green Card as well, which apparently has a qualification or a specific category for international managers or highly qualified individuals who work in corporations. I spoke to some lawyers about it. The success rate for that sort of visa is 50% or less for a lot of applicants. It also requires evidence of a high level of competence in your field, namely through things like your name being published in the Wall Street Journal, or something like that, on a transaction that you represented your client on. At least that’s how it’s applicable to folks who work on Wall Street and in investment banking. I am still relatively junior. I’m a V.P. and not at the M.D. level, so the chances of me getting my name in the newspaper at this point were pretty much nil.

The EB-5 visa just seemed to be a relatively hassle-free process versus a lot of other visas, which depend a lot on the strength of your case, which unfortunately nobody can really quantify for you. I just wanted to get rid of that uncertainty and find a permanent solution to the problem.

I only came to know about this route last year when I was researching options of how to prolong my stay in the U.S. and also be employed. I had not heard about this visa. I had a faint idea about it because I was following the news when the previous government in the United States had increased the investment amount, the amount that investors needed to put in to get a Green Card.

But I never gave it serious thought because I always thought the amount was astronomically high. But when I actually started looking into this a little more in detail and then looked at my situation, I determined that this could be a possible route, maybe as a last resort, and we eventually came to that. That’s when I actually started to pay attention to this.