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The program is put in an extremely strange and non-helpful administrative location for the excitement of worldwide investment in the United States. We are offering away as well much for as well small of a financial investment.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more practical million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they perform in Australia, should be regarding producing service entities, not easy investments. It must be concerning developing real tasks, not specify estimations concerning the indirect production of tasks, which is now part of the regulation.


Maybe that is among the reasons that it has failed every year to reach the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently awkward, and the program is as well full of intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter into later on if anybody is interested.


This is a firm that enjoys to state yes to candidates, but as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have much extra difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that no one has actually truly spoken about much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal denials in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to individuals that can not obtain them otherwise and to individuals whose planned financial investment is in fact less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Allow me expand on one of my observations.


My estimate based upon the capitalists' permit applications submitted 2 years after the very first financial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million validated-- that is my quote. USCIS does not supply the type of information that we can utilize on this.


For every $100 of increased international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one dime. Under a much a lot more shaky analytical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year was regarding $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I anticipate your remarks and questions. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration practice group.




Divine worked as Chief Advice of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and then Performing Replacement Director. He has actually functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was elected, as I understand, vice head of state of the Organization to Purchase USA, the national sector organization of regional centers.


STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE HEAD OF STATE, INVEST IN THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration yearly to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting towards that. Specifically as here USCIS, the firm that looks after the program, has actually been making the policies clearer and the processes much more rational and clear for individuals who are arranging investments and for the investors that are spending, even more people have actually agreed and able to put effort and cash right into the procedure to discover great jobs and establish them, and then a lot more financiers have actually agreed to invest their money and take the risk and use the cash to create the work that is the point of the program.

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These tasks do not wait around for life, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are unwinding their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was stated


The local facility part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and ever since 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 day of expiration in September.


The process takes a good while to develop a task and after that to obtain the investors authorized. And they do not want their cash moving via up until they have been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is already preventing the growth of jobs.

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I would certainly like to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 regulation that is part of the code. It simply is a reality that a lot of the local centers that are merging financial investments have actually established those in areas of high joblessness or in rural areas where half- million-dollar financial investments are enabled, and that makes sense.