AIIA FOIA Series: Pre-RIA I-526 data as of July 2024

Background: As part of our mission to advocate for EB-5 investors, AIIA has filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for information from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on topics that impact the EB-5 immigrant investor community. 

（来自中国的读者们可以通过以下链接访问AIIA微信公众号上发表的本文翻译: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/1ZbNhGXrKHsZZXKg4UkrPw）

Because USCIS does not habitually provide timely response to FOIA requests, AIIA has also initiated litigation against USCIS to compel the agency to respond. We have received, and will continue to receive hundreds of pages worth of documents including internal memos, emails and training manuals. AIIA Members may request a full copy of the government response to AIIA’s FOIA requests.

In today’s EB-5 world, the plight of pre-RIA investors (those investors who invested before March 2022) is often lost in conversation. As the industry has changed its focus to newer, post-RIA investors who are all investing in the reserved set aside visa categories, older pre-RIA investors continue to have their petitions languish at USCIS or wait in visa backlogs for priority dates to move forward.

In the past, we used FOIA requests to try and gauge the overall pending number of I-526 petitions at USCIS. We used that data to create a calculator to try and help inform those investors who invested before March 2022 estimate the backlog and visa wait time for their specific situations.

Now with a fresh FOIA request, we have uncovered the most up-to-date data breaking down the still pending petitions at USCIS by the month/year the investors originally filed their petition.

How many pre-RIA petitions are still pending?

This time we filed another FOIA request asking USCIS to put together a dataset of I-526s that are still currently pending, broken down by country and month+year of petition. USCIS responded by providing a detailed report of I-526 petitions pending as of July 2024, broken down by country (including China, India, Vietnam and Rest of World) and month and year of I-526 filing date. The tables below summarize this critical I-526 inventory data provided by USCIS.

To reiterate this represents the inventory of pending petitions at USCIS that have yet to be adjudicated. These numbers do not include petitions that have been approved and are at NVC or undergoing Adjustment of Status. 

Pending I-526 petition by year/month of priority dates for China as of July 31, 2024:

Pending I-526 petition by year/month of priority dates for India as of July 31, 2024:

Pending I-526 petition by year/month of priority dates for Vietnam as of July 31, 2024:

Pending I-526 petition by year/month of priority dates for Rest of World as of July 31, 2024:

In summary Pre-RIA I-526 Pending as of July 2024 for China, India and ROW:

The data above is sourced from our latest FOIA request and should reflect the most up to date situation for pre-RIA investors. This data can be cross-referenced with the other publicly available datasets shown below to estimate the visa backlog for your individual circumstance.

Please note that the data we have acquired denotes the number of petitions pending at USCIS. Each petition likely has multiple dependents on it and each person attached to a petition requires their own visa allocation.

Below is data from publicly available sources that we have added so stakeholders can be mindful that the pending petitions above only represent a part of the backlog and there are many approved petitioners still waiting for their green card/immigrant visa to be issued to them. 

Approved petitioners at Adjustment of Status stage

The following table illustrates the summary data of Pending Unreserved EB-5 I-485 as of August 3, 2024 sourced from publicly available information. Note that the data represents the number of visas, not the number of approved petitions.

Approved petitioners at Consular Processing stage

The following table illustrates the summary data of EB-5 Applicants with Petitions on File at NVC (detailed by applicant priority date and Foreign State of Chargeability) as of May 16, 2024 sourced from IIUSA’s May 2024 conference. Note that the data represents the number of visas, not the number of approved petitions.

*All years prior to 2014 included in this statistic

Conclusion and Analysis

With the data we have uncovered we hope to achieve two things:

1. Allow for pre-RIA investors to understand just how many I-526 petitions are still pending adjudication and additionally how many approved petitioners are awaiting visa issuance.
2. Ensure that post-RIA investors from China and India are aware that many investors are still waiting for their visas in the unreserved category; therefore, it is very unlikely that they will be able to utilize any of the unreserved visas anytime soon. (As opposed to post-RIA investors from the rest of the world, who are counting on the visa availability of ROW unreserved categories to avoid facing a backlog in the reserved categories.)

Our rough analysis tells us that there is a high likelihood of there not being enough visas to cover all of the pre-RIA investors from China by 2030. That said, India’s pre-RIA backlog should mostly be resolved by 2030 even under the worst case scenario. 

We wish to remind the reader that this is our opinion based on the data above and analysis we have conducted internally. We encourage you to use the data to do your own calculations and reach your own conclusions. We are always seeking volunteers and interested parties to help us with our data analysis as we constantly get official data from USCIS but have limited bandwidth to analyze it.

As a nonprofit organization, AIIA invests significant time and resources in acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating this data. We rely solely on donations to sustain our efforts, including funding FOIA litigation, lobbying, and daily operations. We urge anyone who values our efforts to enhance transparency in the EB-5 program to consider supporting us by making a donation or membership contribution. Your support is vital in ensuring that we can continue to advocate for transparency and equity in the EB-5 program, benefiting investors and industry professionals alike.