On Monday, December 3, USCIS Director, Alejandro Mayorkas, announced that over the next 4-6 months he plans on establishing the new EB-5 Program Office in Washington, DC in response to the exponential growth of the EB-5 program in recent years. The new office will be led by the Chief of Immigrant Investor Programs, a unique position which will, once filled, be tasked with ensuring that “the program is administered efficiently, with integrity, with predictability, and with an understanding of today’s business realities”.
All processing of EB-5 filings will be moved from the California Service Center to the new program office to be handled by an anticipated 50 new employees including economists, attorneys with transactional backgrounds, and a supervisory board to offer opportunities for face-to-face meetings prior to the rendering of a final denial on any filing. The anticipated response time for any filing will soon be 90-120 days which will be a tremendous improvement over the current 8-10 month processing time plaguing the program.
Many participants in this meeting asked the Director to consider special requests as the DC office begins to take shape such as training new employees to specialize in specific areas so that time is not lost cross training assuring applicants are assigned the appropriate expert for each submission; or putting exemplars in a separate queue for faster processing than hypothetical submissions because exemplars represent real deals in need of adjudication in order to continue. The industry is encouraged to find that Director Mayorkas was quite receptive to these suggestions, and several others, in the coming weeks and months.
To read the message from Director Alejandro Mayorkas click here.
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