© Shutterstock
The USCIS Investor Program Office (IPO), which processes EB-5 foreign investor visas and I-829 petitions, can’t seem to get its processing act together.
With the processing time for a 1-829 petition taking years to complete, EB-5 experts say immigrant investors seeking permanent residency in the United States via the EB-5 investment route are being harmed by another inefficiency at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the program’s oversight agency.
“EB-5 forms processed by IPO have by far the worst processing times in the entire immigration service,” said EB-5 expert Suzanne Lazicki, pointing to USCIS’s own processing data. “This could not happen without mismanagement enabled by a lack of oversight.”
It also reflects decisions by IPO management to prioritize extreme vetting-style “integrity” over efficiency, Lazicki told Homeland Preparedness News, “not recognizing that efficiency is also an integrity issue.”
The I-829 petition is the final step an immigrant investor takes in the investor visa EB-5 process to become a lawful permanent resident of the United States. It includes evidence that the immigrant investor has successfully met all of the criteria set by the USCIS for the United States EB-5 visa, employment-based fifth preference category or EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program, which provides a method for eligible immigrant investors to become lawful permanent residents — informally known as green card holders — by making specific investment amounts in certain commercial projects, according to EB5 BRICS, an EB5 visa consultancy.
Once an I-829 is approved, the investor’s conditional residency restriction is removed so that the investor, his or her spouse and their unmarried children under the age of 21 can permanently live in the U.S.
An EB-5 investor may file a I-829 petition with USCIS starting 90 days before the end of the two-year conditional permanent status period. The applicant’s conditional residency is extended while the I-829 is in process. The I-829 application must be filed within 21 to 24 months of the investor’s two-year conditional residency period, otherwise the ability to obtain a permanent residency card can be jeopardized, according to EB5 BRICS.
The problem is that I-829 petitions aren’t being processed in that timeframe.
In fact, I-829 processing volume has dropped steadily every quarter since September 2020, according to the fiscal year 2022 first-quarter USCIS Processing Report that Lazicki, owner of Lucid Professional Writing, compiled and posted on her March 14 blog.
For example, the report, which is based on USCIS Immigration and Citizenship performance data for the FY 2022 period October to December 2021, shows that 326 I-829s were processed, compared to 682 for the same period in FY 2021.
Aaron Grau, executive director of Invest in the USA (IIUSA), a not-for-profit industry trade association for the EB-5 Regional Center Program, said there are only two primary reasons for the EB-5 backlog: 1) lack of enough visas, and 2) processing inefficiencies.
“Over the past months there have obviously been other factors, not the least of which were COVID-19 and the lapse of the Regional Center program,” said Grau. “The former shut down government offices across the globe and the latter disallowed authorization for DHS to do its work.”
But, added Grau, the core issues remain the same. “There are not enough visas and the federal processes are inefficient at best,” he said.
Attorney Ronald Fieldstone, partner in the Miami…
Read More: EB-5 experts weigh in on solving I-829 petition processing backlogs