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The program is put in a really odd and non-helpful bureaucratic place for the stimulation of global investment in the United States. We are providing away as well much for also tiny of a financial investment.


The local facilities, with their half-million schemes, basically damaged the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, need to have to do with producing company entities, not easy financial investments. It ought to have to do with creating actual work, not clarify calculations concerning the indirect development of jobs, which is currently part of the regulation.


Maybe that is one of the reasons why it has fallen short year after year to get to the legislative goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally awkward, and the program is too loaded with middlemen, both public and personal. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will obtain right into later if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that enjoys to say yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually actually talked about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of inner denials in this program and forever factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that can not get them any type of other method and to people whose organized financial investment is in fact much less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean net worth of all American households in 2007. Allow me increase on among my observations.


My estimate based on the investors' environment-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not provide the kind of information that we can utilize on this.


For every $100 of raised international investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a a lot more shaky statistical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling reporters that the level of investment in the just-concluded year was about $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and concerns. [The ready statement of David North shows up as an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our next witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's migration practice team.




Divine acted as Chief Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was click this site Performing Director, and after that Performing Deputy Supervisor. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program in personal practice. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice president of the Association to Buy USA, the nationwide market association of local centers.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you here. Please go on, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE USA (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thank you for having me.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration 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 procedures a lot more reasonable and clear for the people who are arranging investments and for the capitalists who are spending, even more people have wanted and able to put effort and cash right into the process to discover excellent projects and establish them, and afterwards more financiers have actually been prepared to spend their cash and take the threat and use the cash to develop the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not linger forever, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not click this mean that they are relaxing their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they are ready to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was stated


The local center part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations expense that was enacted in 1992, and given that then that program has been expanded five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to function up a project and afterwards to get more tips here the financiers accepted. And they do not want their money moving through up until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already preventing the development of projects.

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I wish to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 regulation that is component of the code. It simply is a fact that many of the local facilities that are merging investments have actually established those instead of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, which makes good sense.