"It is a good location in the sense of EB-5 compliance and
investment principles," he explained.
In August 2017, after five months of intensive due diligence,
Nguyen filed his I-526 petition.
Looking back at his self-instructing crash course on EB-5,
Nguyen acknowledged that navigating through the EB-5 jungle
independently could be intricate and exhausting. He had to
delve into the legal and financial minutiae of the program and
investigate each project thoroughly. But he believes this is an
indispensable stage that every investor ought to go through.
“Imagine you are going to give half a million dollars to
someone else from a country, which you have no clue about,”
he said. “If you have several billion dollars, then throwing in
half a million in this way is fine. But not many investors are like
that.”
The problem is, the majority of Vietnamese investors do not
have the time, language skills and expertise in investment to
find the right path leading to a green card. They have no choice
but to turn to migration agents. He thinks many investors in
Vietnam might be kept in the dark due to the lack of credible
sources of information; they have to guess what is inside the
EB-5 black box.
“Information, information and information — that is the single
most important thing and the biggest challenge facing them,”
he said.
URGING FOR INFORMATION
AVAILABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY
Vietnam has become one of the most prosperous EB-5
markets during the past five years and the upsurge does not
seem to end soon. Some 46 investors from Vietnam were
granted EB-5 visas in fiscal year 2013, while the number
soared to 471 in fiscal year 2017, a roughly ten-fold increase
in only five years, according to the annual Report of Visa
Office published by the U.S. Department of State 1 . Although
the market is thriving, Vietnamese investors’ knowledge
of EB-5 and relevant information available to them are far
from sufficient to support wise investment and immigration
decisions.
Nguyen likens the situation to piloting an airplane with blocked
vision. He estimated that about 70 percent of EB-5 investors
from Vietnam are struggling in such blindness.
Nguyen urges the EB -5 communit y to provide more
information accessible to the Vietnamese market and bridge
the communication gap between project management and
investors.
Public and credible EB-5 information targeting the Vietnamese
audience is very limited, Nguyen criticized.
“I can talk in English and I’ve been to the U.S. many times,”
he said. “But even now, there are still some areas that
I can’t really touch, let alone those investors with little
knowledge of investment and EB-5.” He underscores the
need for a comprehensive and straightforward explanation
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