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The program is placed in a really weird and non-helpful administrative place for the stimulation of international financial investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are distributing too much for as well small of a financial investment. Better, raising equity capital half a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, inefficient.


The local facilities, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the a lot more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they carry out in Australia, need to be about developing business entities, not passive investments. It ought to have to do with developing actual work, not elaborate estimations regarding the indirect creation of jobs, which is now part of the legislation.


Probably that is among the factors why it has actually stopped working time after time to get to the legal goal of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently awkward, and the program is also loaded with middlemen, both public and private. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter into later on if anybody is interested.


This is a company that enjoys to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my statement shows, USCIS police officers have a lot more problem 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 rates of internal denials in this program and for good factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to individuals who can not get them any kind of other method and to individuals whose planned financial investment is really much less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Allow me broaden on one of my observations.


My price quote based upon the investors' permit 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 regarding $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not offer the sort of information that we could make use of on this.


So for every single $100 of raised international financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a far more unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling journalists that the level of financial investment in the just-concluded year was about $1.2 billion. Allow us approve that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look ahead to your remarks and questions. [The prepared declaration of David North shows up as an entry for the document.] 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 company's migration technique group.




Divine served as Principal Guidance of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and after that Acting Replacement Director. He has actually functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in exclusive practice. He was elected, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Organization to Spend in United States, the nationwide sector association of local.


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


At many, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration each year to the USA. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and getting toward that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that manages the program, has been making the policies clearer and the procedures a lot more rational and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists who are investing, even more individuals site web have actually wanted and able to put initiative and money right into the process to locate good projects and establish them, and then more financiers have been ready to spend their money and take the threat and use the cash to produce the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not wait around forever, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, in fact, they prepare to deny applications that are not certifying. And they do go so, as was discussed


The regional center component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations expense that was established in 1992, and ever since that program has been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a good while to develop a task and afterwards to obtain the financiers accepted. And they do not desire their money moving through until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently discouraging the navigate to these guys advancement of projects.

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I wish to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a function of the normal EB-5 legislation that belongs to the code. It just is a fact that most of the local facilities that are pooling investments have set those in places of high unemployment or in rural locations where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.