Do not assume that. Establish the owner’s rights, the company’s authority and the actual proposed transaction with qualified advisers. Immigration route selection and the legality or tax treatment of a company payment are separate questions. A personal net-worth summary should not silently include corporate funds as unrestricted personal cash.
Determine what would actually happen before comparing routes
Write down who applies, who pays and whether money is distributed first or paid under another arrangement. Ask immigration counsel to assess the applicable official process and corporate or tax advisers to review the transaction. Do not choose the lower contribution figure merely by changing the payer’s label on otherwise unchanged facts.
The first treats the payment as something the government provides, which reverses the flow entirely: the applicant pays, the U.S. government receives, and nothing is granted in the other direction except the immigration outcome itself. Under the official framework and Executive Order 14351, the qualifying gift is treated as evidence relevant to the specified EB-1 or EB-2 basis; an applicant must still be eligible for lawful permanent residence, admissible to the United States and have a visa available. Because the process uses existing employment-based immigrant classifications, whatever that classification demands of any other applicant it also demands here, and the payment sits alongside those requirements rather than in place of them.