Reflections on the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on EB-5: Time for TEA Reform

I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at its Hearing on April 13, 2016 entitled: “The Distortion of EB-5 Targeted Employment Areas: Time to End the Abuse.” This article expands upon my responses to some of the questions posed by the Senators.

I have paraphrased some of the questions and included relevant background information, with the aim to retain the spirit of the questions. I will address the questions relating to: (1) whether the area of the Targeted Employment Area (“TEA”) should be expanded to include the local commuter traffic patterns; (2) whether the unemployment rate is the best measure to identify a project location’s ability to attract conventional capital; and (3) whether immigrant investors seeking an EB-5 visa (“EB-5 investors”) should receive credit for 100% of the jobs created by the project, even though the EB-5 capital may represent a small percentage of the total capital costs of the project. Some of the answers overlap because these questions are interrelated.