Update on I-526 and I-526E filings to 11/2023 (pipeline demand for rural and HU visas)

See “AIIA FOIA Series: Updated I-526E Inventory Statistics for 2023” (February 29, 2024) for another important update on pipeline demand for rural and high unemployment set-aside visas. I helped make the charts for this article, and encourage everyone concerned about potential backlogs and wait times to read the article, donate to AIIA (so they can keep doing this!), get the Excel from AIIA with all the details, and work on your own analysis. (Shout-out to Matt Galati, who donated his formidable litigation skills to pushing the data request through the FOIA process.)

I don’t have time at the moment to write in detail about what I see, and in any case I advise that you start by grappling with the facts yourself. Then you’ll be prepared to interpret the variety of motivated/limited conclusions that you will hear from others. EB-5 supply/demand and timing analysis is complicated in detail but basically simple: demand > supply = backlogs and wait times. And so we try to track demand.

The data we can get from USCIS — a count of I-526 and I-526E receipts by petitioner country of origin and TEA category — is not an exact predictor of future visa demand. But it’s extremely useful to know, at least, how many investors have entered the queues for rural and high unemployment visas, even as we have to guess about factors such as queue speed through USCIS processing, denial rates, family sizes at the visa stage, and pace of incoming demand since the last report. (I refer to the new queues as “pipeline demand” for rural and high unemployment visas, because so far it is still mostly just in the pipeline, not at the visa stage. I watch the Department of State monthly visa issuance reports, and no set-aside visas had been issued by consulates yet at least up to last report for January 2024.)

A note on dates: it’s a little hard to tell how many months are fully accounted for in the latest FOIA response. USCIS sent AIIA a table with rows through January 2024, but entered just a few numbers in the rows for recent months. Unless people almost stopped filing petitions over the winter, I guess that the latest FOIA request gives data that’s complete through at least October 2023, only partially counted for December and January, and maybe partially counted for November. (If only USCIS had better systems, and could just print reports without so much struggle and fuss! As it is, I suspect that these FOIA responses require someone going to the warehouse and shuffling through paper to make a tally.) But even if we only look at the I-526 inventory accumulated up to November 2023, there’s already a significant message about demand versus future supply of EB-5 visas.