When Is a Loan Not a Loan? The EB-5 Question Canada Never Answered

Borrow $800,000 for an EB-5 investment, and USCIS calls it capital. But if you borrowed the exact same amount for Canada’s old immigrant investor program, it barely counted as money at all. The same debt with two different outcomes. In this episode, Mona and Rebecca dig into the collapse of the Canadian Immigrant Investor Program, showing how a structure built on interest-free government loans and zero investment risk quietly hollowed out its own economic case, leading to the central question: what actually makes borrowed money legitimate capital?Listeners may remember the Zhang litigation from the 2015 EB-5 era. The years-long fight over whether loan proceeds could qualify as valid capital or should instead be treated as “indebtedness,” and how the fungibility of cash became one of the most contested issues in EB-5 source-of-funds review. Tune in to find out more.