Sensitivity analysis for set-aside visa backlog questions

A couple weeks ago AIIA published the results of a Freedom of Information Act request showing that as of the end of 2023, at least 1,093 rural investors and 2,185 high unemployment investors had filed EB-5 petitions with USCIS. (See the AIIA post for the data and link to an extensive webinar.) Now there’s the battle of interpreting and forecasting from those numbers. What will happen when those investors from 2022/2023, together with their spouses and children, encounter visa availability that’s about 4,000 in the first year and 2,000 in subsequent years for rural, and 2,000 in the first year 1,000 in subsequent years for high unemployment (with further limits from country caps once total visa-stage demand exceeds total supply)? How bad or not-bad-at-all could the backlog situation possibly be for rural and for high unemployment set-asides, considering the scope for variation in assumptions about final visa demand and future visa supply? I think the best industry analysis so far is from IIUSA, which just put out a report by Lee Li “Calculating Demand and Supply for Reserved EB-5 Visa Numbers: Data, Factors, Knowns, Unknows, and Estimates.” I like Lee’s analysis because it doesn’t imply only one possible conclusion from the I-526E data and also doesn’t just say “there’s uncertainty in the variables” and then stop, as if implying that any uncertainty means “so don’t bother thinking about this, you can’t and shouldn’t try to account for this, there are no reasoned conclusions to be drawn, really anything could be possible, believe whatever you/I want you to believe.” Instead, Lee’s analysis models a way to take uncertainty in hand and consider a reasonable range of probability by modeling scenarios. Lee’s analysis focuses on the I-526E inventory as of the end of 2023. We can use the same approach to run scenarios for the possible situation as of today, as exacerbated by another four months of I-526E filings. (To facilitate projections, I recommend getting AIIA’s detailed report of filings by month.)

So long as I’m recommending articles, I’d also like to mention David Bier’s illuminating paper “Green Card Approval Rate Reaches Record Lows” (February 15, 2024). The article isn’t specific to EB-5, but a reminder of demand/supply imbalance issues throughout the immigration system. The charts and graphs alone are excellent and thought-provoking, and I much appreciate his analysis and conclusions.