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The program is put in a very odd and non-helpful governmental place for the stimulation of international investment in the United States. We are giving away as well much for too tiny of an investment.


The regional facilities, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the a lot more sensible million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, need to have to do with developing business entities, not passive investments. It must have to do with developing actual work, not specify calculations about the indirect development of tasks, which is currently part of the regulation.


Probably that is one of the reasons that it has actually failed year after year to get to the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is also full of middlemen, both public and private. The program has even more than its share of detractions, which I will get involved in later on if anyone is interested.


This is a company that loves to claim yes to applicants, but as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have a lot extra problem with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has truly talked around a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal rejections in this program and for excellent reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who can not get them otherwise and to people whose organized financial investment is really much less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Let me expand on among my monitorings.


My estimate based upon the investors' eco-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the very first financial investment-- these are the solid ones that stay and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not give the sort of data that we might utilize on this.


So for every single $100 of boosted international investment that year, the EB program added one penny. Under a much extra wobbly analytical base, the initial applications of prospective immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling journalists 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 listening to me. I expect your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared declaration of David North appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and more info Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration practice group.




Divine functioned as Chief Advice of the United States Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Performing Deputy Supervisor. He has actually functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in private practice. He was chosen, as I understand, vice head of state of the Organization to Buy United States, the national industry association of regional facilities.


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


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the migration each year to the United States. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and getting towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has been making the guidelines more clear and the processes more logical and clear for individuals who are organizing investments and for the financiers who are spending, even more individuals have actually agreed and able to place effort and cash into the process to find good projects and develop them, and afterwards a lot more capitalists have been ready to invest their money and take the danger and utilize the cash to create the work that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are relaxing their analysis, and, in reality, they are ready to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The regional center component of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations costs that was enacted 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 requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a great while to work up a job and after that to obtain the capitalists accepted. And they do not want their money moving via until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is currently inhibiting the growth of jobs.

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I wish to clarify that the Regional Center Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 regulation that is component of the code. It just is a reality that the majority of the regional centers that are merging financial investments have established those in places of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are allowed, which makes feeling.