Why Did The Bill Not Go Through Last December?

It did not go through for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was a fight between the huge developers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami where they were building huge multi-million and billion dollar projects, and part of the project was that part of the financing would be done through EB-5.

The small state regional centers felt they were gerrymandering these TEAs, or “Targeted Employment Areas”. Downtown Manhattan, Century City Los Angeles and other areas would generally not be considered as high unemployment areas, but when you craft together 6 or 7 census districts and take an average of them, then all of a sudden, it could be considered a high-end employment area, so the minimum investment would only be $900,000.

Senators Grassley from Iowa and Leahy from Vermont are from small states and they were the two spearheads of the proposed legislation. They wanted just one TEA, meaning they should not do the project if the census district of the address where the building was being built was not in and of itself high unemployment.

Finally, everybody realized the main thing they wanted to do was to just pass the budget, but they were being held up because of all these issues. They decided to just put this off, so they kept everything as it was for now and then gave everyone 9 months to work this out, which is the main thing that happened.

Could There Be Changes Before The 30 September Date?

Definitely, although I cannot predict what will happen. Certainly, the Integrity is the 1^st and then we will see what the lobbyists start pushing.

Senators and representatives are meeting to craft their own new bill, so one will be introduced sooner rather than later. My advice would be for people to get their investments in while it is still good at $900,000 because the criteria may change in May or June or July or maybe even all the way out to September, although within a few months, we would have a better idea when this would happen.

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