Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) have introduced S. 1501 (the “American Job Creation and Investment Promotion Reform Act of 2015”), which if passed, will reauthorize the EB-5 Regional Center (RC) program for another five (5) years.Since the bill has received bipartisan support, it is clear that both Democarats and republicans recognize the imprtance of the EB-5 program. A copy of the bill is attached.
Some of the key provisions of the bill include the following:
- Increasing the cinvestment amount from $500k to $800k in targeted employment areas and from $1 million to $1.2 million in non-targeted employment areas.
- The states would no longer be given authority to determine Targeted Employment Areas (TEA) which would be the sole domain of the department of Homeland Security.
- Department of Homeland security will be given increased responsibility to terminate regional Center applications for fraud or threats to national security.
- Removal of derivative family members from the quota which would eliminate visa retrogression and make more EB-=5 visas available each fiscal year.
- Preapproval of a Business Plan by a Regiuonal Center application prior to filing any Investor Petitions.
- Premium Processing to expedite Business plan approval and even possibly Investor Petitions.
- Establishment of an EB5 Integrity Fund to investigate fraud and make site visits. Each regional Center would initially contribute $20000 to this fund
- Background checks for developers and principals of Regional Centers
- At least 10% of jobs created must be direct job
- For EB-5 investors to receive credit for jobs created in a project, at least half of them would have to be created in TEA areas.
- Gifts of funds will only be accepted from parents, spouse, child, sibling or grandparent
- Concurrent filing of I485 adjustment of status applications and the I526 Investor Petition.
- In certain circumstances, conditional residents who derived their conditional residency status as a child of an EB-5 investor and whose I-829 application is denied, may remain a “child” of the EB-5 investor in a subsequently filed I-526 petition
- Loans as a source of EB-5 funds can aonly be used if secured by personal assets
- Expansion of SEC Juristiction outside the USA so that the purchase or sale of securities by any RC (or person associated with an RC) will be deemed to have occurred inside the USA in order to to protect EB-5 investors
- See also /blog/bid/64333/EB-5-Investor-Visa-Program-May-Undergo-Significant-Changes