The Mobility Dividend
Why immigration planning belongs in the wealth management conversation
The most common way immigration enters a family office conversation is as an emergency.
A child finishes a degree and has thirty days to find an employer. A spouse cannot work. A grandchild wants to stay and nobody has thought about how. At that point it lands on an immigration lawyer's desk as an urgent problem, usually with very few options left on the table.
I spoke about this last week in Milan, at the Campden Wealth European Family Enterprise and Innovation Forum, to a room of family enterprise owners, family office principals and next generation family members. My argument was a simple one, and it is not really about visas.
Almost everything a family office does is built to protect capital across generations. The investment policy, the tax structuring, the trusts, the succession planning, the governance. Decades of professional effort go into making sure the money survives the handover from one generation to the next.
Very little of that effort goes into protecting where the owners of that capital are actually able to live, study and work.
That separation between wealth planning and immigration planning made more sense when the pathways were stable. They are not stable anymore.
What changed in 2026: F-1 duration of status and H-1B costs
This is the part of the conversation where I try hardest to stay factual, because the temptation to sell urgency is obvious and it is the wrong instinct with this audience.
The student visa route is the clearest example. For roughly four decades, a student in the United States on an F-1 was admitted for what was known as duration of status. They could stay as long as they were enrolled, with no fixed end date, and the university handled most of the administration. A final rule published by the Department of Homeland Security in July replaces duration of status with a fixed admission period, capped at the length of the programme and no more than four years at a time. More time now means a formal extension application to a federal agency rather than a sign-off from a registrar. The grace period after finishing a programme drops from sixty days to thirty.
For families whose children are already studying in the United States, that shortened window is the practical difference between planning and scrambling.
That rule is subject to congressional review and is being challenged in federal court, so the specifics may still move. I said so in the room and I will say it here. But the direction has not moved, and for planning purposes the direction is the thing. What used to be administrative background has become a recurring filing risk sitting on the family's own timeline.
The H-1B work route that usually followed has narrowed in parallel. A presidential proclamation last September attached a six-figure charge to new petitions in the main professional work category. Set the politics aside. A six-figure cost on a sponsored hire changes employer behaviour, and it changes it most for the candidate who needs sponsorship in the first place. Families who assumed the path ran from student visa to H-1B to green card are discovering that the middle link is now the weakest one.
Further afield, several European residency-by-investment programmes have been closed, repriced or restricted over the past four years.
None of this warrants panic. It warrants earlier planning, because optionality is a depreciating asset. It is cheapest when you do not need it yet.
The question worth asking
Here is the reframe I would most want a family to take from all of this.
The question is not which visa is cheapest, or fastest, or easiest this year.
It is which pathway leaves the timeline and the outcome in our hands rather than in someone else's.
Nearly every category I described shares one structural feature. Status is tied to a school, an employer, or an allocation the family does not control. And none of them, on their own, leads to permanent residency. They are all someone else's decision, renewed on someone else's schedule.
The EB-5 investment visa is the main exception, which is why it belongs in this conversation rather than in a separate one with a lawyer three years from now. It is worth adding that for a family whose child is already in the United States on a student visa, concurrent filing can provide work and travel authorisation while the petition is pending, which is often the detail that makes the timing work.
How to evaluate an EB-5 capital stack
I expected the immigration content to drive the conversation in Milan. It did not. The capital stack did.
That should not have surprised me. Campden's own research shows more than seventy percent of family offices completed direct investments last year, and more than half expect to expand co-investment activity. The instinct driving family office investing right now is a move toward direct deals where families want control, alignment and a clear view of what they own, rather than exposure through a blind pool.
Viewed through that lens, a well-structured EB-5 investment is a direct position in an institutional-quality development that happens to carry a second outcome. I was not asking anyone to invest differently. I was pointing out that something they already do well has a second use.
So we walked the stack from the bottom up. The senior construction loan sits in first position, usually an institutional bank. Above that, the middle of the stack. Above that, the sponsor's own equity, which takes the first loss.
EB-5 capital sits in one of those two middle positions, and the distinction matters more than most offering materials suggest:
EB-5 as mezzanine debt sits junior to the senior lender and senior to all of the equity. Repayment is contractual and the position has a defined place in the waterfall.
EB-5 as preferred equity sits behind the debt but carries priority over common equity on distributions and on return of capital.
Both structures are standard across the industry. Neither is inherently right. What matters is that a family knows which one it is buying, and how that position behaves if the project runs into trouble. If you cannot tell from the offering materials where the EB-5 money sits, that is the first question to ask the sponsor.
The questions I would ask on any EB-5 project are the ones any credit investor would ask:
Where exactly does my capital sit, and what sits below it
Has the senior lender already closed, and did that underwriting hold up
How much of the sponsor's own money is behind mine
What specifically has to happen for the capital to come back
What is the plan if that does not happen on schedule
One point deserves to be said plainly, because it is where this asset class differs from everything else in a portfolio. The preferred return is low by design. What is being bought is the residency, not the yield. Return of capital, not return on capital, is the measure that matters here.
What EB-5 is not
Credibility in this conversation depends on being as clear about the limits as about the case.
This is not right for every family. It is a real investment with a real risk of loss and it should be sized that way. The capital must be genuinely at risk, which is a legal requirement rather than a disclaimer. It is not passive paperwork, and the source of funds documentation standard is high. It is not fast for every country of origin.
It is also not tax migration, a distinction I raised in Milan before anyone had to ask me. United States permanent residency carries worldwide tax obligations, and that needs proper advice well before anyone signs anything.
Families who treat the investment decision and the tax planning as sequential usually find that some of the useful windows have already closed. I tell prospective investors plainly that they need a tax advisor before they need me.
Global mobility, properly understood, is the ability to preserve and expand a family's economic, lifestyle and generational options across borders. Framed that way it stops competing with the rest of the wealth plan and starts completing it.
The conversations that stayed with me
The most useful exchanges I had over those two days were not about any particular project. They were with families whose children are already studying in the United States, and who had not registered that the ground shifted underneath them this summer.
Every one of those conversations ended in the same place. Not with a decision, but with the recognition that this belongs in the family wealth plan before a child applies to university, rather than in the thirty days after they graduate.
My thanks to Campden Wealth for a genuinely well-run forum.
Joan Hull, CFA is Director of EB-5 Capital Development at Brevet Capital Management.
