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The program is placed in an extremely strange and non-helpful governmental place for the excitement of worldwide investment in the United States. We are offering away also much for also tiny of a financial investment.

The regional centers, with their half-million systems, basically damaged the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they do in Australia, must have to do with creating company entities, not passive investments. It needs to have to do with creating genuine tasks, not elaborate computations concerning the indirect creation of jobs, which is now part of the legislation.


Maybe that is one of the factors why it has actually stopped working year after year to reach the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally awkward, and the program is too full of middlemen, both public and exclusive. The program has even more than its share of rumors, which I will certainly enter later on if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that likes to state yes to applicants, but as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have much more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that no one has actually truly discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of inner rejections in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who can not get them differently and to individuals whose planned financial investment is in fact much less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Allow me expand on among my monitorings.


My quote based upon the financiers' permit applications submitted 2 years after the first financial investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million verified-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not offer the sort of data that we might use on this.


So for every single $100 of increased international investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a much a lot more unsteady analytical base, the first applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I expect your comments and questions. [The ready statement of David North appears as 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 immigration technique team.

Divine acted as Chief Counsel of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and after that Acting Deputy Director. He has functioned extensively with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice president of the Association to Spend in U.S.A., the nationwide industry association of local centers.


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


At most, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, however it is growing and getting towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the agency that looks after the program, has actually been making the regulations more clear and the procedures more reasonable and clear for individuals who are organizing investments and for the investors who are investing, even more individuals have actually wanted and able to place initiative and cash right into the process to discover excellent projects and establish them, and after that a lot more capitalists have actually agreed to invest their money and take the threat and use the cash to create the work that is the factor of the here program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are trying to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are relaxing their analysis, and, actually, they prepare to refute applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was stated

The local facility part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations bill that was enacted in 1992, and since then that program has actually been extended five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it needs to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The process takes a great while to work up a project and afterwards to get the financiers approved. And they do not desire their money moving with up until they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is currently preventing the growth of projects.

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I want to clarify that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a function of the routine EB-5 legislation that is part of the code. It just is a truth that the majority of the regional centers that are pooling financial investments have actually established those instead of high joblessness or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are allowed, which makes good sense.