WASHINGTON – Sens.
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a senior member and former chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, today introduced the EB-5
Reform and Integrity Act of 2021 to address fraud and national security vulnerabilities
in the EB-5 investor visa Regional Center Program, which has been exploited and
abused for years. Their bill includes significant integrity reforms to protect against
fraud and national security weaknesses within the program, promote program
integrity and improve oversight of the program. It also reauthorizes the EB-5
Regional Center Program, which is currently set to expire at the end of June.
“It’s
no secret that the EB-5 Regional Center Program has been a mess for years. Foreign
investors exploited the program to get fast-tracked green cards, domestic
developers exploited foreign investors to get fast cash for bogus projects and
government officials picked winners and losers to score political favor. This
has got to change. The Obama and Trump administrations took important steps to
restore incentives for investment in rural and truly underserved areas, but
Congress must act to fix other flaws that invite fraud and abuse. Our bill
corrects the many defects in the current program and improves accountability so
that it functions as Congress intended. Absent these fixes, this program should
not be allowed to continue,” Grassley
said.
“I
have partnered with Senator Grassley for years to clean up the EB-5 program. We
successfully worked with both the Obama and Trump administrations to take
important administrative steps to promote integrity and curtail abuses that
have plagued the program. But the Department of Homeland Security cannot fix
all of the EB-5 program’s flaws on its own. Congress must act decisively to
comprehensively address the fraud and other vulnerabilities that have come to define
the EB-5 program. Our bill would do just that,” Leahy said.
Following
a
2019
push
from Grassley and Leahy, the Trump administration
adopted
regulations to restore incentives for EB-5 investments in
rural and economically depressed regions. However, congressional action is
required to rectify documented
fraud and
national
security vulnerabilities within the EB-5 Regional Center Program.
The bipartisan
EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2021 establishes new
disclosure requirements for EB-5 regional centers in order to protect investors
and certify regional center compliance with program rules. It also requires the
Department of Homeland Security to perform regular audits of and site visits to
regional centers.
The EB-5
Reform and Integrity Act of 2021 is supported by Invest In the USA (IIUSA),
the national industry trade association for the EB-5 Regional Center Program.
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