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


The regional centers, with their half-million systems, essentially damaged the more reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, ought to be regarding creating business entities, not passive financial investments. It must have to do with developing genuine jobs, not elaborate computations regarding the indirect creation of work, which is now part of the regulations.


Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it has actually failed year after year to get to the legislative goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally awkward, and the program is too filled with middlemen, both public and exclusive. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will obtain into later on if any person is interested.


This is an agency that enjoys to say yes to candidates, but as the table in my testament shows, USCIS policemans have a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has actually talked around 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 go to individuals that could not obtain them differently and to individuals whose planned investment is actually much less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the typical mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Allow me broaden on one of my monitorings.


My quote based on the capitalists' permit applications filed 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the solid ones that remain and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not supply the sort of data that we might utilize on this.


For every $100 of increased foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a far more unsteady analytical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the level of financial investment in the just-concluded year was about $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I look onward to your remarks and inquiries. [The ready declaration of David North looks like 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 firm's immigration practice team.




Divine functioned as Chief Advise of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and afterwards Acting Replacement Director. He has actually functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in personal method. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Organization great site to Invest in United States, the nationwide sector association of local centers.


Divine, we are thrilled to have you right here. Please go on, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, ATTORNEY, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, BUY THE United States (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thanks, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At many, if all 10,000 ports were used, it would be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and obtaining toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the company that manages the program, has actually been making the regulations more clear and the processes a lot more rational and clear for the individuals that are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists that are spending, even more find out here individuals have been prepared and able to put initiative and cash into the process to locate excellent projects and establish them, and after that extra financiers have wanted to invest their cash and take the risk and utilize the cash to produce the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These tasks do not linger for life, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The regional facility component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and given that then that program has been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The process takes an excellent while to develop a project and afterwards to get the capitalists authorized. And they do not want their cash moving through until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is currently dissuading the advancement of projects.

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I would love to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 law that is part of the code. It just is a truth that a lot of the regional facilities that are merging financial investments have actually established those instead of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar financial look these up investments are allowed, and that makes feeling.