Lifting of Trump's hiring freeze is good news for EB-5 investors
NPR reports that President Trump has lifted the freeze that he had previously placed on the hiring of federal workers. Click here to view that news story.
The lifting of the hiring freeze is good news for EB-5 investors, since the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program Office ("IPO") was in the process of hiring additional examiners back when Trump imposed the hiring freeze. The IPO and its predecessor, the EB-5 Unit at the California Service Center, had neglected to hire enough examiners to keep up with the rapidly growing workload that came from USCIS having approved so many regional centers, which effectively increased their case processing volume exponentially, and that is part of what brought us to the current case processing backlog and the long processing times that we are experiencing today. The IPO, and the CSC EB-5 Unit before it, have also been slow to embrace technological solutions such online filing or streamlining of processing such as by having a single submission of project documents and a single, decisive decision on the project rather than allowing multiple examiners to go back and review the project all over again. It currently takes the IPO three months just to forward a case file over to the National Visa Center to start the consular processing stage. Let's hope that this is a small step in the right direction.