By: Bernard Wolfsdorf A silver lining exists for some immigrants due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. With most U.S. consulates closed or limited to emergency visa processing, there will be many more employment based (EB) immigrant visas available in Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 which starts on October 1, 2020. The Immigration and Nationality Act provides that if the full quota of family-based visas is not used in any fiscal year, then the unused numbers are added to next year’s employment-based immigration quota. The October 2020 Visa Bulletin indicates that the employment-based quota will be 261,500 – almost double the usual annual quota. This is all-time high – as opposed to the usual 140,000 visas. With U.S. Consulates operating at minimum capacity together with Presidential Proclamations suspending most family-based immigrant visas – there has been a huge “spillover” of at least 120,000 visas available in FY 2021. EB-5 gets 7.1% of those. So, in addition to the normally allocated 10,000 visas, the EB-5 category will get at least 8,566 extra visas for a total of around 18,566 visas. These additional visas, together with future unused visas resulting from the November 21, 2019 Modernization regulations that increased the minimum investment to $900,000 for Targeted Employment and Rural areas, could […]