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The program is placed in a really strange and non-helpful bureaucratic location for the excitement of global financial investment in the United States. We are offering away also much for too tiny of a financial investment.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, must be regarding producing organization entities, not passive investments. It needs to be about producing actual tasks, not clarify estimations concerning the indirect development of work, which is currently component of the legislation.


Maybe that is among the reasons that it has actually stopped working time after time to reach the legislative goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently clumsy, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and exclusive. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will get right into later on if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that likes to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testament reveals, USCIS officers have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that no one has truly chatted around a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior rejections in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who might not obtain them otherwise and to people whose scheduled financial investment is in fact much less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the average mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Allow me broaden on one of my monitorings.


My price quote based on the investors' copyright applications filed 2 years after the first financial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million verified-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not offer the kind of information that we might use on this.


So for every single $100 of increased foreign investment that year, the EB program added one cent. Under a a lot more wobbly analytical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the level of investment in the just-concluded year was concerning $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your remarks and questions. [The prepared declaration of David North appears as an entry for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's immigration practice team.




Divine acted as Principal Advise of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Acting Deputy Supervisor. He has functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program in exclusive practice. He was chosen, as I understand, vice head of state of the Organization to Spend in United States, the nationwide industry organization of regional.


Divine, we are happy to have you right here. Please proceed, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, BUY THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At most, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the migration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that supervises the program, has actually been making the rules more clear and the processes a lot more rational and clear for individuals here who are arranging investments and for the capitalists who are spending, more people have wanted and able to put initiative and cash into the process to discover excellent projects and establish them, and after that more financiers have wanted to invest their money and take the risk and use the money to produce the work that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, actually, they are prepared to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local center part of the program is not. It is component of an appropriations costs that was established in 1992, and considering that then that program has actually been extended five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it needs to be done now and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to develop a task and after that to obtain the capitalists accepted. And they do not desire their money streaming via up until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already dissuading the development of projects.

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I want to clarify that the Regional Center Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 legislation that becomes part of the code. It just is a fact that most of the local facilities that are pooling investments have established those instead of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar financial investments are permitted, which makes good sense.