By Marta Lillo
The latest quarterly report for the 2023 fiscal year (FY 2023) shows the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received and processed more Form I-526s between July and September, compared with the previous three quarters, while concentrating its approvals and denials on requests filed before the Reform and Integrity Act 2022 (RIA).
Filing the I-526 form is the first stage in obtaining an EB-5 visa. Between October 2022 and September 2023, the joint number of I-526 (standalone investor) and I-526E applications (regional center investor) the USCIS received totaled 2,616, the highest since the 2020 fiscal year, of which 945 were solely submitted in the fourth quarter.
EB-5 form denials were also high
Approved forms totaled 2,212 last year, of which 63 are new and the rest are legacy. Meanwhile, the agency rejected 1,104 throughout the year, almost half the number of approvals filed before RIA.
However, there are 12,140 I-526 forms still pending, lower than the 13,232 awaiting a decision at the beginning of the 2023 fiscal year; most concern those filed pre-RIA or EB-5 regional center investor applications.
For EB-5 immigration attorney Charles Kuck, these figures “provide a disturbing view into a broken system.”
“USICS is only adjudicating 600 more cases than it takes in during the fiscal year. At this overall fiscal year rate, USCIS will take somewhere around another 15 years to get caught up on EB-5 adjudications! If USCIS kept up its pace of 1,291 adjudications a quarter, then it could eliminate the backlog in three-four years. Another revelatory aspect of these numbers is that USCIS only approves about 65% of the EB-5 filings. USCIS does not disclose the reasons for its denial, but if you look at all of the other types of employment-based immigration filings, this denial rate is severely skewed against the immigrant,” Kuck cautions.
The USCIS also took longer to process pre-RIA forms in the fourth quarter, with processing times increasing from 47.5 months at the start of the year to 50.5 months by the fourth quarter.
“The disturbing conclusion of these numbers, projecting forward, is that the EB-5 program appears to have been intentionally stifled by the bureaucracy charged with its success,” says Kuck. “This cannot be accidental. The big question is do the last quarter’s efforts mean a new light is shining on the program?” the attorney questions.
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