The new, fully Senate-confirmed inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security has reminded us that his office has a dim view of the administration's favored immigrant investor (EB-5) program.
Earlier IG reports on this program, mostly adverse, were blurred, at least in many minds, by the bureaucratic feud between the then-acting IG, Charles K. Edwards, and the then-USCIS Director (now Deputy DHS Secretary) Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas was, and is, a strong supporter of the EB-5 program.
the EB-5 Visa Program:
The EB-5 program grants a family-sized set of green cards to aliens who agree to invest half a million dollars in an USCIS-approved, but not guaranteed, investment. Most of these are middle-sized real estate deals.
The bureaucrats' battle is over now. Mayorkas has won. Edwards is out of the IG's Office and has been placed on administrative leave, while investigations into his actions are ongoing. For more on that unattractive history, see here and here.
Now DHS has a new IG, with no "acting" in his title. He is John Roth, a career civil servant, and he has just issued a semi-annual report to Congress on DHS.
That report carries (pp. 25-26) these comments about EB-5:
We sought to determine whether USCIS' Employment-Based Fifth Preference regional center program, also known as the EB-5 program, is administered and managed effectively. ... USCIS was limited in its ability to prevent fraud or national security threats that could harm the U.S.; and it cannot demonstrate that the program was improving the U.S. economy and creating jobs for U.S. citizens as intended by Congress.
Given that mindset let's hope that Roth sets his staff to work digging into the piles of dirty linen in the EB-5 program, particularly as it relates to the scandals in South Dakota. There, millions and millions of EB-5 investors' funds were lost in ways that are not yet explained, while the state government cheered on the program and subsidized some of its activities — all marred by the mysterious death of one of the state officials, as we reported earlier.