American Lending Center has broken new ground in the EB-5 industry with the first approvals of public infrastructure projects as qualified projects for EB-5 investment since approval of the Reform and Integrity Act in March 2022.

That RIA act, overseen by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency, mandated that 2% of reserved visas be set aside specifically for government infrastructure projects. The other areas are those with High Unemployment and Rural areas, based respectively on the unemployment rates and population in the area. Those have been the primary EB-5 projects to date, according to ALC’s Senior Vice-President Scott Wagner.

“I think the reason why infrastructure projects have been so rare is because it is very difficult to structure an EB-5 loan into a project that is government administered,” Wagner said.

Due to the different criteria used for such projects – financing through municipal bonds, interest rates lower than those of commercial loans and more – no projects have been approved for this designation in the 2 ½ years since the bill’s passage.

As is the case with the other categories of visa set-asides, public infrastructure projects must generate a certain number of new jobs. But specific qualification requirements for projects in this new category were uncertain.

“The whole industry has been scratching its collective head and nobody seemed to have a clue on how to develop such a project,” said John Shen, ALC’s founder and CEO. “That is part of the reason why there hadn’t been an approval of such a project.”

One of ALC’s initiatives over the last few years has been financial support for improving access to rural health facilities – and rural hospitals typically are operated by public agencies such as health districts. Two such projects have been supported through ALC financing, and were submitted to the USCIS for approval under this category.

In the last month, both have been approved.

Here are the projects.

• UAB Medical West Hospital in Alabama. Opened earlier this year, this project includes a state-of-the-art 200-bed nine-story patient tower, a seven-story medical office building and an 828-space parking structure. It replaced a 1964 hospital, and created 497 jobs. UAB Medical West was the first project to qualify for the USCIS public infrastructure category.
• Samaritan Hospital, across the country in central Washington state, serves five towns and the rural area surrounding them. Operated by the community-owned Samaritan Healthcare, the 1955 hospital in Moses Lake is being replaced with a 50-bed state-of-the-art center, including a new emergency center with 17 points of care compared to nine treatment rooms in the old hospital. The new facility is under construction now.

As of today, ALC has received a total of 26 I-956F approvals of sponsored EB-5 projects.

For more information about ALC, please visit our website.

About American Lending Center:

American Lending Center Holdings (ALCH) is a California corporation that currently manages 13 EB-5 regional centers capable of sponsoring EB-5 projects anywhere in continental United States. Since its inception in 2009, the regional centers have successfully raised EB-5 capital for 98 EB-5 projects (as of 9/30/2024) in 31 different states. ALCH made the list of “Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America” by Inc. 5000 in each of the last five consecutive years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024) and was ranked on the prestigious list of “Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies” by Financial Times in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

American Lending Center LLC (ALC), a sister company and a former subsidiary of ALCH, is a mission-based California regulated lending institution. It is also a licensed NFRL SBA 7(a) lender and authorized SSBCI lender in California. ALC underwrites prospective EB-5 projects on behalf of ALCH. As of September 30, 2024, ALC and ALCH have helped create or retain over 140,000 jobs in the American economy.

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