E-2 Treaty Investor Visas
The E-2 is the treaty investor visa: nonimmigrant status for citizens of the eighty-plus countries that hold a qualifying treaty with the United States, who put substantial capital at risk in a real U.S. business and come to run it. You can buy an existing business, take on a franchise, or build one from nothing. Your spouse can work once you arrive, children can study, and the status renews for as long as the enterprise operates and qualifies.
At a glance
Three ways in
The classification serves one client in three situations. What changes between them is how you prove the money is real and the business will support your family.
Acquisitions are among the cleanest E-2 cases, because the enterprise already has books, staff, and a track record an officer can read.
Franchises add the franchisor agreements and fees to the file, and the standardized model often helps an officer see that the business will work.
The hardest to document, because there is no history. The spending has to be real and the plan has to be specific before you sit down at the interview.
The elements
There is no single threshold to clear. An officer reads the file for all of these at once, and a case usually fails on one of them rather than on the whole picture.
Source of funds is where most avoidable trouble lives. Savings, a property sale, a business sale, a gift, or a loan can all work, and each one has to be traced from where the money came from to where it now sits in the business. We build that record before anything is filed.
How it runs
A first-time E-2 is a consular case. The enterprise is registered with a U.S. consulate abroad, you and your family interview there, and the visas are issued before anyone moves.
Common questions
There is no fixed minimum in the statute or the regulations. The test is proportionality: the investment must be substantial relative to the total cost of buying or building your specific business, and the business must be more than marginal. A service business might qualify on a modest sum fully committed; a manufacturing operation demands far more. What decides cases is not the headline number but whether the money is real, traceable, at risk, and enough to make the enterprise operational.
Your spouse may work incident to status, with no separate work permit required, and may work anywhere, not only in your business. Children under 21 may live and study in the United States but may not work, and they age out of E-2 dependency at 21, which is worth planning for early. Spouses and children take E-2 dependent status regardless of their own nationality.
As long as the enterprise operates and qualifies. Admissions run two years at a time, extensions come in two-year increments with no overall cap, and the visa itself can be issued for up to five years depending on your country’s reciprocity schedule. Decades on E-2 status are common. The discipline is that every renewal re-proves the case.
The treaty list is the whole ballgame: without a qualifying treaty there is no E-2. The alternatives depend on your situation and may include the O-1A for people with a strong professional record, the L-1 for executives transferring from a business you already own abroad, or the EB-5 immigrant investor route at a much higher investment level. We will tell you which, if any, actually fits.
Not by itself. It is a nonimmigrant status that requires intent to depart, and it can be renewed indefinitely without ever leading anywhere. Investors do move to permanent residence, most often through EB-5, and the timing and forum matter enough that the conversation should start years before you want the card.
A first call covers whether your nationality and your business fit the treaty, what a substantial investment looks like for what you are buying or building, how the source-of-funds record gets assembled, what your spouse and children can do once you arrive, and what the whole thing costs. Schedule a time below, or write to us using the details here.