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Initially, the program is positioned in a really odd and non-helpful bureaucratic area for the stimulation of international investment in the USA. Second, its range is all wrong. We are distributing way too much for as well little of an investment. Additionally, elevating financial backing fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to claim the least, inefficient.


The local facilities, with their half-million schemes, essentially damaged the extra practical million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they perform in Australia, must have to do with creating business entities, not passive financial investments. It needs to have to do with developing real tasks, not elaborate calculations about the indirect development of tasks, which is currently component of the regulations.


Perhaps that is among the reasons it has actually stopped working every year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is inherently awkward, and the program is as well loaded with middlemen, both public and personal. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will obtain right into later on if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that likes to state yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS policemans have far more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually actually spoken around much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of interior denials in this program and for great reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who could not get them any type of other way and to people whose planned investment is in fact much less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the ordinary mean internet well worth of all American families in 2007. Let me increase on among my observations.


My estimate based on the financiers' copyright applications submitted 2 years after the initial financial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million verified-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not supply the sort of data that we could utilize on this.


So for every single $100 of increased international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a a lot more unsteady analytical base, the first applications of potential immigrant Full Article capitalists, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look onward to your remarks and questions. [The ready declaration of David North looks like a submission for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. 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 migration technique group.




Divine functioned as Principal Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Migration Solutions from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and after my response that Performing Replacement Director. He has actually worked extensively with the EB-5 program in personal technique. He was elected, as I understand, vice president of the Association to Buy USA, the national market organization of regional centers.


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


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were used, it would be 1 percent of the immigration every year to the USA. It is not near that yet, but it is expanding and obtaining towards that. Especially as USCIS, the agency that oversees the program, has been making the policies clearer and the processes much more sensible and clear for individuals that are organizing investments and for the investors who are spending, more people have agreed and able to put effort and money into the procedure to find good projects and create them, and afterwards more capitalists have agreed to invest their money and take the danger and use the cash to develop the work that is the factor of the program.

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These jobs do not linger for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to refute applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional facility part of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations costs that was established in 1992, and because then that program has actually been expanded 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The web process takes a good while to develop a job and afterwards to obtain the financiers accepted. And they do not desire their money streaming through till they have been authorized. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently inhibiting the advancement of projects.

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I want to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar thing. The concept of half a million or a million is a function of the regular EB-5 legislation that is component of the code. It simply is a fact that a lot of the regional centers that are merging investments have established those in places of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, which makes sense.