An Open Letter To USCIS From A
Practicing EB-5 Economist On
USCIS Guidance To Economic
Inputs For Job Creation Studies
by Scott Barnhart, PhD
In a relatively rare event, on June 4, 2015 USCIS held
a stakeholder call specifically addressing allowable project
construction and pro-forma income budget items for EB-5
economic job creation modeling, i.e., “Expenses that are
Includable (or Excludable) for Job Creation.” The event was
rare because, in this practitioner’s nearly 9 years of experience
conducting EB-5 job creation studies and business plans,
USCIS has seldom provided specific guidance on any individual
line item in construction/development budgets outside of that
given in Requests for Evidence (RFE). USCIS indicated that
the goal of the call was to reduce the number of RFEs and
adjudication times by clarifying how adjudicators assess project
budgets, which are the basic input used by the economist
to conduct a job creation study. The guidance that USCIS
economists provide is essential, and they should be commended
for providing practitioners with valuable information that not
only results in fewer RFEs, saving industry stakeholders crucial
time and expense, but is likely to make economic results more
consistent from one practitioner to the next.
The purpose of this article is to briefly explain the most
important aspects of the USCIS stakeholder call, which with
one or two exceptions for most experienced EB-5 economists,
was not too surprising. The article will then address some
important questions that remain unanswered in an attempt to
encourage USCIS to continue this type of useful interaction.
The important issues for practitioners are not only avoiding
RFEs to save time and expense, but also to ensure consistency
from one economic study and practitioner to the next, which
is crucial to project managers, regional centers, adjudicators/
regulators and especially foreign investors, whose future life
as an immigrant crucially depends on the job creation results.
Consistency across practitioners/economic reports should be
a relatively easy objective to achieve considering most of the
economic inputs and project types are similar. Some specific
examples of what might aid all involved in this industry are
provided below, but the message conveyed in this article is
that more guidance from USCIS is preferred to less, provided
this guidance is reasonable, follows economic logic, and is
responsive to feedback given by stakeholder practitioners. The
goal should be to have guidelines that lead to sound, conservative and realistic job creation estimates such that if several
experienced professionals in the field analyzed a given project
independently, each practitioner would obtain results that are
not dramatically different.
The June 4th stakeholder call started with a prepared statement discussing, among other things, hard and soft construction
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