Governor Dennis Daugaard has been backing away, kinda sorta, from the misguided and scandal-riddled EB-5 investment program. So, apparently, is President Barack Obama:
Nathan Nicholas, a policy advisor in the governor’s office in Wyoming, said the state has looked at EB-5 money as a way of bringing investment into the state, but there isn’t much movement in the area right now.
...Nicholas said he recently spoke to an Obama administration official about foreign direct investment, asking about EB-5.
“He said the program is broken at a national level and that it hasn’t been successful,” Nicholas said. “He told me it would be a mistake for the state to partner with an EB-5 regional center. That resonated quite a bit” [Kay Kguyen, "SD Regional Center's Contract Unique," Aberdeen American News, 2013.11.24].
South Dakota ran its own EB-5 regional center for years, then let its EB-5 director take the operation private and make bigger personal profit off each visa deal. That arrangement was as broken its biggest investment project, the bankrupt Northern Beef Packers plant. It's too bad President Obama, Governor Daugaard, and the man who got the mess rolling in South Dakota, Governor Marion Michael Rounds, didn't realize EB-5 was a mistake sooner.