There is a door marked “In” and a door marked “Out,” and in November 2026 the investor migration market is holding both of them open, often for clients from the same zip code.
On November 3, Democrats took both the House and the Senate. Three days later, the President made Stephen Miller his chief of staff, and Miller moved in on Monday. Washington’s verdict arrived almost as quickly: Congress will investigate, the White House will dig in, and nothing much will change. For deportations, that verdict is broadly right. For EB-5, it is half right, which in immigration law is another way of saying it is wrong.
Two numbers make the point. The first is 71.1 percent: the share of EB-5 investors wiring funds through Customers Bank escrow accounts in fiscal 2026 who were already living in the United States when they invested, up from 30.9 percent three years earlier.
The second is 234: the number of applications Americans had lodged for New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus visa, more than China (108) and Hong Kong (91) combined. Portugal reinforces the picture: U.S. nationals received 535 of the 2,685 investor residence permits issued in 2025, more than any other nationality.
America’s investor visa is increasingly bought by people already inside the country. America’s wealthy are increasingly buying someone else’s. The 2026 midterms caused neither trend, and they will undo neither. What they change is the calendar on which EB-5 has to prove it can still deliver.
The Door Marked “In” Is Mostly Used From the Inside
The clearest evidence comes from escrow, not petitions. Customers Bank presented wire data at a recent local EB-5 conference covering roughly 100 projects and about 4,500 investors since the 2022 reform law. It is one bank, not the market, but the direction is hard to argue with.
USCIS data tells a related story without picking a winner. Through the first three quarters of fiscal 2026, Indian investors filed 1,977 petitions and Chinese investors 1,970. After years in which China dominated EB-5 filings, the two largest markets are separated by seven filings: a photo finish, not a rout.
The rush ahead of the September 30, 2026 grandfathering deadline also came from inside the country. By early October, more than 21,000 applicants in the reserved visa categories had adjustment of status applications (the switch to a green card from inside the United States) pending, with Indian rural-project investors filing nearly a thousand in a single month.
The reason is structural. The 2022 reform law lets an investor already in the U.S. file for adjustment of status alongside the investor petition, which for an H-1B worker facing an employment-based queue that can run well over a decade means work authorization, travel permission and an exit from the line.
The Inside Door Has a New Lock
That domestic advantage now faces a policy aimed squarely at it. USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0199, issued May 21, 2026, describes adjustment of status as “a matter of discretion and administrative grace, and an extraordinary relief,” and instructs officers to weigh discretion even where an applicant meets every statutory requirement. Choosing to adjust in the United States when consular processing is available is treated as a negative factor.
EB-5 applicants have stronger ground than most: concurrent filing for EB-5 investors is written into the statute and many hold dual-intent visas such as the H-1B. But the memo states that maintaining a dual-intent status is not, by itself, enough to warrant approval.
The obvious alternative is the consulate, and that door is not reliably open either. On August 25, the State Department paused immigrant visa interviews worldwide for consular training on public charge screening. As of November 2, interviews remained paused at many posts with no general resumption date, though posts in Hungary and Poland had resumed. USCIS prefers the front door. The State Department has closed it for training.
Advisers who treat “EB-5 processing” as one queue will misread their clients’ risk. There are four separate gates, run by two agencies, each moving at a different speed.
Three points follow. First, USCIS decides the project application before any associated investor petition, so an investor with an impeccable source of funds can still be waiting on the project’s I-956F application. Second, the goals are goals: DHS declined to write them into regulation when it finalized the new fee rule. Third, “current” on the Visa Bulletin is a priority date, not a processing time. A file can be green at three gates and red at the fourth.
The Gatekeeper
A White House chief of staff decides what reaches the President’s desk and who reaches the President; insiders call the job the gatekeeper. From Monday, the gatekeeper is the official most associated with restricting immigration, legal as well as illegal. Miller is credited with shaping the 2017 travel ban and the 2018 “zero tolerance” border policy, and CBS News reports that in this term he helped drive the tightening of access to green cards, the effective closure of the asylum system and the shutdown of refugee admissions.
The promotion also removes a brake. The New York Times reported, citing Sen. Lindsey Graham, that Miller and outgoing chief of staff Susie Wiles had debated how wide to “cast the net” on enforcement.
That debate has now been settled by subtraction. Two days after the election, U.S. officials told CBS News the crackdown was unlikely to ease. Asked about the direction of travel, one said: “I would count on the opposite.” ICE officers were recently told to aim for about 19,000 arrests a week.
For EB-5, the effect is less theatrical and more procedural. Public charge has been Miller’s signature legal-immigration project since his first term, when he pressed to deny green cards to immigrants who had used public benefits. This year’s worldwide pause in immigrant visa interviews is, by the State Department’s own account, public charge training.
And any bill reauthorizing the Regional Center Program will now reach the President through Miller’s office. A program on a statutory deadline needs someone in the West Wing to carry its bill to the desk. As of this week, the man holding that door has spent a decade closing it.
The Calendar, Not the Ballot
Recall that in February 2025 the President announced, “We’re going to end the EB-5 program and replace it with the Trump Gold Card.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, co-author of the 2022 reforms and champion of EB-5, says he is not resigning but, thanks to the Mid-Term Massacre, will lose the Judiciary Committee gavel in January. So the program’s most persistent reformer loses his gavel in the same week that its most famous critic gains a new gatekeeper.
None of that changes EB-5 tomorrow. Three dates will:
- November 30, 2026. New USCIS fees apply. The I-526E fee rises from $3,675 to $7,850, and the I-956F project fee from $17,795 to $42,675.
- January 1, 2027. Minimum investment amounts adjust for inflation under the statute, measured by the consumer price index and rounded down to the nearest $50,000. USCIS has not published the new figures; industry projections put the reduced minimum at about $900,000.
- September 30, 2027. The Regional Center Program’s authorization expires unless Congress extends it. Petitions filed on or before September 30, 2026 are grandfathered. Petitions filed since then are not.
Only the last of these needs Congress, and it is the one place where the election matters. An industry coalition has asked for an extension to 2032 attached to must-pass funding legislation. Any extension must pass a Democratic Congress and be signed by a President who promised to end the program. The alternative he offered has not taken off: USCIS data showed 100 Gold Card petitions pending untouched, and the program faces a federal lawsuit filed in February.
One argument advisers should stop making: that USCIS needs EB-5 revenue and will therefore protect the program. The new fee rule says the fees “will only recover the cost of the EB-5 program and will not recover costs for other programs,” and puts that cost at $105.0 million in an agency fee account of about $6.96 billion. EB-5 pays its own way. It does not pay anyone else’s.
The View From Abroad
Overseas, the message has been received. In Customers Bank’s escrow data, the share of EB-5 investors living in China fell from 51.3 percent in fiscal 2023 to 11.5 percent in fiscal 2026, and the share living anywhere outside the United States fell from 69.1 percent to 28.9 percent. The data does not say why. It does say the overseas investor has not been deported. He has simply stopped arriving.
He is in good company. U.S. universities reported a 20 percent drop in foreign student enrollment for spring 2026, and 84 percent of the schools surveyed blamed restrictive government policy; F-1 student visas issued from May to August 2025 fell 36 percent year on year.
Since January 1, 2026, nationals of 19 countries have faced a full suspension of U.S. visa issuance and nationals of 19 more a partial one. Across the Middle East, U.S. posts suspended or limited consular services after combat operations against Iran began on February 28.
The money that might once have come to America has found other addresses. Henley & Partners reported first-quarter 2026 application growth for Greece, Italy, Malta and Nauru, and sharply higher inquiries for New Zealand, Costa Rica and Turkey. In 2019 the President declared, “The system is full.” Seven years later, much of the world appears to have taken him at his word.
The Door Marked “Out”
Now the other direction. In New Zealand’s revamped Active Investor Plus visa, Americans filed 234 applications covering 711 people, ahead of China with 108 applications and Hong Kong with 91. One analysis of Immigration New Zealand readouts puts the U.S. share at roughly 40 percent across every quarterly report since the relaunch, for a program whose minimum is NZ$5 million.
Portugal tells the same story at a lower price. AIMA’s 2025 migration report, released in September 2026, shows U.S. nationals receiving 535 of 2,685 investor residence permits, or 19.9 percent, the largest national group.
Americans are buying in even as the payoff lengthens: Portugal’s revised nationality law, signed in May 2026, extends the residence requirement for citizenship from five to ten years for most non-EU nationals.
The Gulf shows the same instinct from a different starting point. Henley & Partners reported that inquiries from UAE-based clients rose 41 percent and applications 26 percent in the first quarter of 2026, driven largely by expatriate communities.
A word of caution before anyone writes “exodus.” The U.S. list of people renouncing citizenship or long-term residence ran to 4,889 names in 2025, below the 2020 record of 6,708. Wealthy Americans are buying options, not giving up citizenship.
Same Advisers, Both Directions
Full disclosure: I advise clients walking through both doors, sometimes in the same week. That is not a contradiction. It is what investor migration now looks like from a U.S. desk.
Before recommending an EB-5 filing in 2027, an adviser should be able to answer six questions:
- Where does the client live today, and can an adjustment application withstand discretionary review under PM-602-0199?
- Is the project’s I-956F approved, pending or not yet filed?
- What is the client’s country of chargeability (the country that sets his place in the visa queue), and where does it sit on the Visa Bulletin for the chosen category?
- Does the filing land before or after November 30, 2026, January 1, 2027, and the September 30, 2026 grandfathering date, and what protection follows from each?
- If the client is pursuing consular processing, is the relevant post actually scheduling interviews?
- For an outbound client, what is the real timeline from residence to citizenship in the target country, as of today’s law?
The Bottom Line: Nothing Is Changing. Or Is It?
Here is what has not changed. ICE’s money runs through September 2029. The adjudication machinery, the I-526E backlog and the adjustment memo are exactly where they were on November 2. Demand for EB-5 is still strong, and it is still coming mostly from inside the United States.
Here is what has. The brake in the West Wing is gone, and the new gatekeeper has spent a decade narrowing the door. Overseas investors now make up less than a third of one major escrow channel. Prices rise on November 30 and again on January 1. And the one immigration decision a Democratic Congress cannot avoid is whether the Regional Center Program exists after September 30, 2027.
So yes, nothing is changing, except the things that decide whether a client’s file ever reaches the fourth gate. Advisers should watch three dates and one signature, and should not assume that the person holding the pen is the person holding the door.
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of IMI.
