By Robert J. Blanco, Attorney, Wolfsdorf Rosenthal and McKenzie Penton, Membership Coordinator, IIUSA
The IIUSA Membership Committee is pleased to announce a new recurring feature in the Regional Center Business Journal, the Committee Corner. Each edition, members of the committee will highlight one of the many membership benefits that their organization or company found crucial to their success in the industry. The new feature is intended to highlight membership benefits that as a member you may not be aware you have or have not yet utilized. It is the committee’s goal to consistently improve IIUSA’s value proposition to members through benefit analysis and new programing recommendations while being on the forefront of the recruitment of an ever growing and diversifying membership base. With those goals in mind, we present to you the first ever Membership Committee Corner.
Let’s face it – navigating the complexities of the EB-5 Industry can be complicated, but IIUSA is here to help. One of the main benefits provided by the organization is the array of EB-5 data analytics and reports produced by IIUSA’s Policy Analysis team. However, many members may not fully utilize the multitude of information and statistics available right at their fingertips in the IIUSA Member Portal.
Although government agencies publish immigration statistics, they often do not tell the whole story. Through its “FOIA machine,” IIUSA files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with various government agencies to retrieve helpful industry statistics not ordinarily published. The FOIA’d statistics enable IIUSA to produce extensive data analysis and reports on key industry metrics relevant to EB-5 regional centers, developers, and attorneys. Here are some examples of the data analyses and information that can only be accessed with an IIUSA membership.
One of the most cited statistics by anyone in the EB-5 industry, especially by foreign investors, is petition processing times. In the IIUSA Member Portal, users have access to data reports on month-to-month processing times as well cumulative processing trends from the Program’s inception to the present. This data allows members to compare processing time trends across various time periods. When USCIS changed the format from the number of months pending to “as of dates,” IIUSA created a standardized data set for members to easily compare this data over time across different formats.
