The federal government approved a plan to finance a domestic cobalt refinery by offering green cards to foreign investors — trading American residency to break China's stranglehold on a mineral the Pentagon and EV industry both need, rather than developing the resource with American capital and American labor.

USCIS greenlit EVelution Energy's EB-5 investment offering for a proposed $450 million cobalt refinery in Yuma County, Arizona, the Daily Caller reported. The approval lets the company pursue up to $64.8 million in foreign capital. Two investors have already kicked in $1.6 million, structured as five-year subordinated debt paying 9% annually. The minimum buy-in: $800,000. The reward: a path to permanent residency for the investor, their spouse, and eligible children — though participation doesn't guarantee a green card.

The stated purpose is serious. China processed roughly 78% of the world's refined cobalt in 2024, according to International Energy Agency figures cited by Reuters. The United States currently has zero commercial-scale cobalt refining capacity. EVelution says its facility could eventually supply about 40% of projected domestic demand — cobalt used in military aircraft, aerospace components, advanced electronics, and the electric vehicle batteries Washington is mandating Americans buy.

So the solution to foreign dependence is… more foreign dependence — just a different kind. Rather than mine and refine cobalt with American investment and American workers, the bipartisan playbook is to auction off residency to the highest bidders.

EVelution at least recognizes the irony. The company prohibits investors from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, citing national security. "Because of the project's national security importance, we have adopted a strict Non-Foreign Entity of Concern Investor Policy," a spokesperson told the Daily Caller. But the policy does not explicitly bar Indian nationals — and Indian investors just surpassed Chinese as the top EB-5 applicants, filing 1,977 petitions in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2026 compared to 1,970 from Chinese investors, according to IIUSA, an EB-5 industry group. Together, Chinese and Indian nationals accounted for roughly 73% of all EB-5 petitions in fiscal year 2025.

Meanwhile, the same administration is publicly cracking down on other visa pipelines. Vice President JD Vance announced the suspension of several major tech companies from the PERM green card program, accusing them of using foreign workers as "indentured servants" to undercut American wages. "The programme has become rife with fraud," Vance said. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling named Microsoft, Adobe, and several Indian IT firms — Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL Technologies — as suspended from the program. "Who pays for it all? The American worker," Sonderling said, as Al Jazeera reported.

So PERM is fraud, but EB-5 is policy. One program imports cheap labor; the other imports cheap capital. In both cases, the American worker and the American interest take a back seat to someone else's bottom line.

The open question: if cobalt is a national security imperative — and it is — why is Washington selling green cards to fund a refinery instead of building one outright? China didn't corner the market on cobalt by auctioning visas. It cornered the market by investing state resources and treating mineral dominance as a strategic priority. The U.S. response isn't to match that seriousness. It's to put a "For Sale" sign on the front door and hope the right buyers show up.