Report on Nov 2020 IPO Non-Engagement

This week, the USCIS Investor Program Office used three venues to dismay the public with a disingenuous presentation of ostensible EB-5 program updates. You can find this non-engagement posted in PDF form in the USCIS Electronic Reading Room, recorded on Youtube, and as a presentation by IPO Chief Sarah Kendall to IIUSA. (The three are essentially identical.)

I learned a few things from the presentation.

To start with the positive, IPO says that they recognize and are actively working to fix two problems: the issue that family members have been scheduled on different days for I-829 biometrics (a system glitch), and the issue of delay in sending approved I-526 to the National Visa Center (a temporary staffing issue).

The most negative update: not a word in answer to many urgent clarification questions about redeployment; only insulting parroting of previously-published language with no acknowledgement of industry feedback.

IPO’s dedicated staff is currently at 232 people – down but not much from the last-reported level of 245 people as of March 2020. I’m happy to hear that the furlough threat between March and August didn’t result in more attrition. Almost 100% of staff have been working from home since March.

IPO indirectly responded to the question of whether the process for assigning I-526 is first-in-first-out, for petitions with visas available. In the presentation and also an additional Q&A on the Visa Availability Approach FAQ page, IPO highlights project review as a second factor in determining I-526 processing order.  “IPO manages Form I-526 petition inventory through workflows factoring in whether: (1) A visa is available (or will be available soon); and (2) The underlying project has been reviewed. Workflows are generally managed in FIFO order when a visa is available or will be available soon.” This helps to explain what we see anecdotally – that I-526 are not necessarily assigned in filing date order even for people with identical visa availability circumstances. Petitioners associated with projects already reviewed in previous petitions can apparently expect swifter attention than those who invested in novel projects — creating an asymmetry that’s understandably practical but with negative results from a public policy and integrity perspective.

I-526 and I-829 productivity have not continued to improve. From March 2020 to August 2020, the presentation says that IPO averaged 304 I-526 completions per month and 265 I-829 completions per month. That’s no improvement on January to March 2020, and still three to four times lower than the IPO’s productivity in 2017 and 2018, before Sarah Kendall took over as Chief at IPO.  (See the table at the base of this post for detailed reference.) Most disheartening: Kendall did not regret the dismal productivity over the past few months or foresee future improvement, but actually boasted about the numbers up to August 2020 by comparing them favorably to her own worst record in mid 2019. There were 16,633 pending I-526 at last report. If the current abysmally low productivity continues, an average I-526 filed today won’t even get looked at until 16,633/304=55 months from now. (The visa availability approach offers a time discount for I-526 from low-volume countries, but at such low productivity even they would wait three years for attention, according to per-country data, while high volume countries would be looking at well over five years unless IPO performance improves.)

“What are you doing to ensure program integrity today, USCIS?” The answer: “Sorry we can’t know what’s going on with EB-5 investment today because due to our low productivity we’re nowhere near being able to examine new files – and at our current rate we won’t even look at investments happening now and petitions being filed today for another three to five or more years in the future.” That answer should make Congress very angry. It certainly angers and frustrates the industry, as we try our best to maintain integrity even as USCIS won’t examine or let us know what’s going on. Until USCIS improves productivity, it’s basically saying “Welcome wannabe fraudsters, come over to EB-5 where we’ll offer you many years to operate in the dark while we waste resources implementing a time-is-no-object process on old petitions, actively discouraging new honest use of the program.”  And still Kendall dares to claim that there’s integrity in using an office of 232 people to implement a new process so slow that it can only process about 570 investor petitions per month – less than 3 per IPO employee – while large backlogs wait unexamined. Biden administration, note that the USCIS Investor Program Office needs changes, and quickly. As recently as 2018, before Sarah Kendall took over, IPO was more than three times more productive with fewer people. We need that performance back as soon as possible.

Overall, IPO’s presentation is a masterclass in non-engagement. The playbook:

• Ignore questions. (Among the ignored questions, see this list from IIUSA, most of which I wasted my time writing. USCIS particularly went out of its way to avoid answering questions about policy manual feedback, redeployment policy changes, source and path of funds policy changes, and I-526 data by country.)
• In the guise of answering questions, reiterate word for word what the public already knows from information previously published. (This method was used to not answer our clarification questions about processing times, the visa availability approach, and redeployment policy updates, and to provide non-information about Form I-924A.)
• Allow no interaction whatsoever. While Sarah Kendall did at least appear live at the IIUSA meeting, it was only to read aloud her talking points from the PDF and Youtube Video – no questions or comments were allowed. “Public engagement” used to mean that USCIS would have a quarterly call or meeting to talk to and listen to stakeholders; now all we can do is listen to a YouTube video and give it a thumbs down, or take the public engagement survey to indicate that we are very dissatisfied. (At least do this, everyone, for what good it does.) IPO is showing simply zero good faith or willingness to take stakeholders as partners.

Sarah Kendall said that “Program integrity is at the forefront of everything we do. IPO is continually fielding questions from Congress and others on performance in this area.” I choked. As someone who actually does care about and stand for program integrity, I wish I could field questions about IPO’s performance.  Congress and others: contact me. Senator Grassley’s office: I understand your concerns and would love to tell you true stories that USCIS and the lobbyists won’t tell you. David North, I’d even be happy to chat with you.  I can provide detail and evidence regarding specific IPO practices and policies that have – by malice and/or simple stupidity — gutted EB-5 program credibility, invited abuse, and undercut every Congressional objective for EB-5, from job creation impact to promotion of economic growth in rural and distressed areas. (In these efforts the lobbyist side has a culpable role as well, but that’s a conversation for another day. If only the majority of EB-5 users had any voice at all in the industry!)

As USCIS acknowledges in the presentation: “we have seen that the vast majority of petitions and regional centers are engaged in legitimate business activities and endeavor to strengthen U.S. communities by creating jobs.” The same cannot be said of IPO under current leadership. If you’re part of the new administration, and motivated to heal our legal immigration system from the recent efforts to savage it, the Investor Program Office at USCIS needs your urgent and early attention.  EB-5 can and should be a credible and effective tool for economic growth, job creation, and immigration by people who immediately benefit the United States. For that to happen, the program needs competent and responsible new management. (And indeed, this need applies to USCIS as a whole.) [12/2020 update: Sarah Kendall has left IPO, replaced for now by someone named Todd Young serving as acting chief. Now I feel bad. In Ms. Kendall’s defense, she probably did exactly and simply what she was hired and directed to do at IPO.]