USCIS Holds Teleconference With EB-5 Stakeholders

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) held a teleconference on February 26, 2014, with EB-5 stakeholders. Nicholas Colucci, the new director of USCIS’s Immigrant Investor Program Office, led the teleconference.

Among other things, USCIS said that it is now adjudicating I-924 regional center petitions and

I-526 alien entrepreneur petitions in the Washington, DC, field office, but that it continues to adjudicate I-829 removal of conditions and I-485 adjustment of status petitions at the California Service Center for the time being.

USCIS also said it is moving toward greater use of its Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) and has implemented it for intake of I-526 petitions. The agency said it plans to offer webinars on the features of the document library, which allows regional centers to provide electronic versions of certain documents.

USCIS noted that regional center geographic area expansion must be contiguous to approved geographic areas. USCIS said it reviews such expansions on a case-by-case basis to determine whether the expansion will promote economic growth, frequently focusing on the supply chain and labor pool.

Targeted employment areas (TEAs) have been a hot topic for EB-5 stakeholders. USCIS noted that a TEA need not be singular and a new commercial enterprise can be principally located in, doing business in, and creating jobs in a collection of TEAs.

USCIS also confirmed that a high unemployment TEA must be established by a letter from an authorized body of the government of the state in which the new commercial enterprise is located, certifying that the geographic or political subdivision of the metropolitan statistical area, or of the city or town with a population of 20,000 or more in which the enterprise is principally doing business, has been designated a high unemployment area.

As of February 1, 2014, USCIS had approved approximately 440 regional centers. The agency said the average processing time for both regional center cases and direct EB-5 cases is 11 months, but that processing may take longer temporarily due to staffing issues. The agency also said it is planning new EB-5 regulations and a policy guidance manual.

The list of EB-5 regional centers by state is available at . This article is based on multiple reports; USCIS has not yet released a summary of the teleconference.