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The program is placed in a really weird and non-helpful administrative area for the stimulation of international financial investment in the United States. We are giving away also much for too tiny of an investment.


The local centers, with their half-million plans, essentially undercut the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they perform in Australia, should have to do with producing organization entities, not easy financial investments. It needs to be concerning developing actual jobs, not specify computations regarding the indirect development of work, which is currently component of the regulations.


Maybe that is among the reasons it has actually fallen short year after year to get to the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is also loaded with middlemen, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will enter later if any person is interested.


This is an agency that enjoys to say yes to applicants, but as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS police officers have far more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that no one has really spoken about much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner denials in this program and for great reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people that can not get them otherwise and to individuals whose organized financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Let me broaden on among my observations.


My price quote based on the capitalists' environment-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the strong ones that remain and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million verified-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not provide the kind of information that we can use on this.


For every $100 of increased foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one penny. Under a a lot more shaky statistical base, the preliminary applications of potential immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was about $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I expect your remarks and questions. [The ready statement of David North appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration technique team.




Divine offered as Chief Counsel 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 worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was elected, as I recognize, vice head of state of the Organization to Spend in United States, the nationwide industry association of regional.


Divine, we are pleased to have you below. Please proceed, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE HEAD OF STATE, PURCHASE THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it more info would be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the USA. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and obtaining toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the agency that manages the program, has been making the regulations more clear and the procedures more sensible and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the financiers who are spending, even more people have wanted and able to put effort and cash into the procedure to find great tasks and create them, and after that more capitalists have been ready to spend their money and take the threat and make use of the cash to create the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger for life, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed up the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their examination, and, in fact, they are ready to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local facility component of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations expense that was established in 1992, and considering that then that program has been extended five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a good while to develop a task and afterwards to get the financiers authorized. And they do not desire their money streaming with until they have been authorized. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already inhibiting the development of tasks.

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I want to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a function of the routine EB-5 legislation that becomes part of the code. It simply is a truth that the majority of the regional centers that are merging financial investments have actually set those in areas of high joblessness or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes feeling.