What should the Investor do with Continuing Resolution?

Published on 10/06/2015

Hello, I’m Vaughan de Kirby. I’m happy to announce that last week, Congress passed what’s called a continuing resolution, which continues the EB-5 program until December 11, 2015. The good news here is we still have EB-5. The difficult news is we still have a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot that’s unknown.

Do we know whether Congress will act before December 11to enact the new law? Unfortunately the answer is no. We really don’t know whether Congress may act sooner. Well, if we don’t know when Congress will act, do we know what Congress might do? Again, we’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty. We do have some clear indications of what we expect, but again, it’s very uncertain.

The No.1 that may impact your application is we do anticipate very very firmly that we believe Congress will increase the investment amount to $800,000. You may have heard about the grandfathering idea—the fact that projects that have exemplar approval at $500,000 may be able, even after the new law’s passed, to continue offering their investments at $500,000. Yes, we believe some provision will be allowed. However, something that’s happened within about the last three months, is many regional centers have put in skeletal applications, very very simple applications that really don’t contain all the facts, and really don’t allow USCIS to make an evaluation.

We anticipate that USCIS will intelligently require, or Congress in this case, will intelligently require some additional steps. We believe that what we may see is an exemplar application required, and the submission of I-526 is required. This is something you need to discuss very carefully with your immigration attorney to make sure that you’re investing in a qualified project.

Another thing that we expect, or anticipate, based on existing legislation that’s been proposed is we expect more examination of source and path of funds, which means that you may be required to provide more evidence regarding how you obtained your lawful funds and how those funds arrived in the United States. How difficult this will be? We don’t know. There’s some terrible provisions that’s been recommended, but we certainly hope that Congress will act intelligently, and maybe make it a little bit tougher, but not make it so tough that no one will qualify.

What’s the takeaway from this uncertainty? I think if you and your family really want to move forward on EB-5, now is the time to do it. We know what the law is today, we know what the requirements are today, we know the projects today, we won’t know that tomorrow, or we certainly won’t know that until Congress acts. So my recommendation, my takeaway from what’s happening is thank goodness we have EB-5 and it’s continued till December 11. But what that tells me is that if I’m interested in EB-5, I will take action. I hope this is helpful.

Vaughan de Kirby
Connect with me
San Francisco California EB-5 Investment Immigration Attorney