With Nigeria’s weak passport, EB5 visa initiative provides green card for investors – Khan

Ahmed Khan is the senior vice president of the EB5AN – a top regional centre that promotes the EB5 programme in the United States. In this interview with Josephine Okojie-Okeiyi, he speaks about investment migration and how Nigerians can invest in the EB5 visa programme.

Can you just briefly tell us about the EB5 visa programme?

The EB5 visa programme allows people from all over the world to invest in the United States, create jobs, and as a result, they get a green card, which is permanent residency for themselves and their family.

As of now, the investment amount is about $800,000. With it, they are able to get their green card between 1.5 to 2-year timeline, and a lot of these projects will also repay their capital in 3 to 5 years depending on the project that they choose.

In a nutshell, it’s an economic advancement programme that’s distributed by the U.S. to foreign nationals, and the way to get in, is to invest and get a green card.

Why is investment migration becoming popular in Africa and especially in Nigeria?

Investment migration is becoming popular globally not just in Africa. In 2008, we saw the global financial crisis, in 2020 COVID, and we saw that people who have money really wanted freedom more than anything else, and having multiple passports and citizenship gives you a lot more freedom.

For countries that have restrictive passports, Nigeria being on that list, it becomes very attractive to be able to have that backup to travel. I also think that having medical care is one of the big drivers for a lot of people in their considerations. As they’re getting older, they want some of the more advanced care that’s available in the United States and other countries.

Why Nigeria? Nigeria has essentially exploded economically, right? This is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and it already is one of the economic centres of Africa.

As more people are making money and are seeing the economy develop, they’re taking advantage of their newfound funds and using them to further their business and life. Getting to the U.S. themselves becomes a personal goal, but also expanding their business into the United States, expanding commerce between Africa and the U.S. is a big goal as well.

The U.S. offers a unique blend of lifestyle benefits and business opportunities. How do you see this combination appealing to investors looking to secure both a financial return and second citizenship?

The EB5 programme uniquely placed to open up investors in a quick way.

It gives you the freedom to choose whether you want to start your own business, work for a company or do both.

Having the freedom to basically choose where you live make a big difference. You’re not tied to one location with an EB5 investment. You can invest in New York and live somewhere else completely.

Read also: 4 visas that give Nigerian passport holders access to more countries

The freedom that having a green card gives versus a more restrictive visa is the big reason why people continue to choose EB5. And the advantages are clear because you’re not restricted by employer, location, any type of work, and business.

The Trump administration has been making lots of immigration changes. What is the role of the U.S. government in your programme and how are they backing it?

One thing that is always true is that money talks and this programme brings a lot of money into the United States. It pumps money into the U.S. economy and the people who actually benefit the most from this programme are U.S. developers.

Trump himself actually is a developer. This programme enjoys bipartisan support, meaning both political parties actually are supportive of this programme. They have to be for it to be able to pass every five years.

We choose projects that are residential-focused. We don’t know how the economy is going to react, and so we don’t want to go into projects that are a little bit more volatile, like hotels, hospitality essentially, and some other types of businesses or commodities that are depending on government subsidies.

We want to stick to something that we know is going to be true no matter what, which is that people need a place to live, and residential will always have a market in the U.S.

Focusing on Nigerians and other African businesses, how does your organisation protect their investments from harsh economic trends both globally and in their country of residence?

To us, no one can predict the future, but what we can basically do is put in safeguards for every event that we think can happen. The way to do that from an investment standpoint is to not go into investments that are speculating.

We’re not going into projects that are just a drawing on a piece of paper. We’re going into projects that are already underway, and even if we raise zero dollars for them, this project is going to be built. It already has all the approvals, it already has all the money, already has all the backing that it needs to be finished.

By so doing, we’re eliminating the first risk, which is immediate volatility from the project even before starting. Now, in terms of future volatility and making sure that there’s still an avenue for the investors to get their money back, even if the economy does go up and down, we account for pretty much the worst-case scenario that we’ve ever had in our lifetimes, which is 2008.

And that was a 20 percent variance. That meant that essentially real estate in the U.S. depreciated by 20 percent overnight. And all of our projects have enough collateral that we can take a 20 percent hit on existing assets today, existing properties, and still walk away with 100 percent of our money.

It would have to be something that’s basically unprecedented, never seen before, and even then, we wouldn’t walk away empty-handed. We might lose 5-10 percent of what we expected, but as it is right now, that’s the main focus.

Even if the project fails, that’s more of a financial problem, and that’s where the different safeguards that we put in terms of collateral value and things like that come in, but you can still get your green card. And in fact, if you look at projects that have failed, it’s not that they failed to be built. They failed after they were built because they weren’t as successful as they had hoped.

In those situations, all the investors still got their green cards and an opportunity to get their money back.

How does Nigeria as a country benefits from your organisation’s investment migration programme?

Over the years, what we’ve seen different with countries that have adopted this programme and has become very popular there, is that you see it opening up channels of commerce.

There’s a lot of ways to get to the U.S., but the only way when you’re a business person is to basically invest, to get a green card for the entire family.

When those business people then go to the U.S., they don’t just retire and stop working. No, they do a new business, or they open up another office of their existing business in the United States, and they open up that new channel of commerce.

We’ve seen this with Korea, China, India, and Bangladesh. When a population starts moving back and forth between the U.S. and Nigeria, you see that presence start to attract a lot more openness between the two countries, not only for business, but for education purposes.

Universities start taking notice that the population of Nigerians in an area is growing, and they start flying out to Nigeria to recruit students to bring them back to the U.S. and offer them scholarships. So, it’s a process. It’s not overnight.

My experience with investors has been they move to the U.S. physically, but their heart is still always in their home country. This is where they were born, raised, and made their initial money.

This is a lot of money that someone made here in Nigeria, and they come back and they give back to their community, and they tell their friends, this is how I did it, you should do something similar, this is how it went well for me, and this is how you should do it. We’ve seen it open up the doors both ways.

The more exposure that Nigeria and Lagos get through programmes like this, the more the tourism gets up and becomes a destination as more people come here. So that’s the whole idea which is to open those doors and create those bridges between countries.

There are lots of investments by migration programmes. Why should investors choose to invest in your programme?

Every investor has different options available to them. And for some of them, it won’t be the right option. It is a very expensive programme.

Maybe if they’re just looking for a little bit better passport, then they are better off going to the Caribbean and getting a second passport from Granada. That gives them Schengen access to Europe.

But if they’re looking to maybe further their business and their kids who are looking to go to school in the United States. For them, the U.S. is boundless. We have one of the best education systems in the world. We’re better than Europe.

If what you’re looking for is an expansion of your business, there is no economic centre like the U.S. in the world. As fast as China has grown, as fast as India has grown, as fast as Brazil has grown, nothing comes close to the U.S. economy. It offers so much more from a financial perspective than any other economic opportunities globally.