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The program is positioned in an extremely weird and non-helpful governmental location for the excitement of international investment in the United States. We are providing away too much for too little of a financial investment.


The local centers, with their half-million plans, essentially damaged the more practical million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they perform in Australia, ought to have to do with producing service entities, not easy financial investments. It ought to have to do with developing genuine tasks, not elaborate calculations about the indirect creation of tasks, which is now component of the regulation.


Maybe that is one of the reasons that it has stopped working year after year to get to the legal objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is too full of middlemen, both public and exclusive. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter later on if any person is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to state yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot a lot more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that no one has actually discussed much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior rejections in this program and for good reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who can not obtain them differently and to people whose scheduled investment is really less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Let me broaden on one of my monitorings.


My estimate based upon the investors' eco-friendly card applications submitted 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million verified-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not give the kind of information that we could make use of on this.


For every $100 of boosted foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a much extra shaky statistical base, the preliminary applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling reporters that the level of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us approve that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I look forward to your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like an entry for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration technique group.




Divine acted as Principal Guidance of the USA Citizenship and Migration Providers from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and afterwards Acting Deputy Director. He has actually functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Spend in USA, the national sector association of regional.


STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others.


At many, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and obtaining towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has been making the guidelines more clear and the processes more reasonable and clear for the individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the investors who are spending, even more individuals have wanted and able to place initiative and money right into the process to locate good tasks and develop them, and then extra investors have actually wanted to invest their money and take the threat and utilize the cash to develop the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not linger for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are relaxing their analysis, and, actually, they prepare to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The local facility component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations costs that was enacted in 1992, click here and considering that then that program has actually been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a good while to function up a task and afterwards to obtain the financiers authorized. And they do not want their cash moving through till they have been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is already dissuading the development of tasks.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 law that is part of the code. It just is a reality that most of the regional centers that are merging investments have established those in locations of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, and that makes sense.