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The program is put in an extremely strange and non-helpful administrative place for the stimulation of international investment in the United States. We are offering away also much for too small of a financial investment.


The regional facilities, with their half-million systems, basically undercut the a lot more reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them at all, as they carry out in Australia, need to be regarding creating service entities, not passive financial investments. It must be about developing genuine jobs, not specify estimations concerning the indirect development of tasks, which is currently component of the regulation.


Probably that is one of the reasons it has fallen short every year to get to the legal objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally awkward, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has even more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get involved in later if any person is interested.


This is an agency that loves to state yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS officers have much a lot more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has actually truly spoken around a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of interior denials in this program and permanently factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people that can not obtain them otherwise and to people whose organized financial investment is actually much less, according to the Federal Book, than the average mean net well worth of all American family members in 2007. Allow me broaden on one of my observations.


My price quote based upon 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 concerning $191 million validated-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not provide the kind of data that we can make use of on this.


For every $100 of increased foreign investment that year, the EB program added one cent. Under a far more unsteady analytical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant investors, USCIS is visit our website informing journalists that the level of 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 eagerly anticipate your remarks and questions. [The prepared declaration of David North shows up as a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's migration method team.




Divine worked as Chief Advise official source of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Solutions from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and afterwards Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually functioned extensively with the EB-5 program in personal practice. He was chosen, as I understand, vice president of the Organization to Invest in USA, the nationwide sector organization of regional.


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


At most, if all 10,000 slots were used, it would be 1 percent of the migration each year to the USA. It is not near that yet, however it is growing and getting towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has been making the regulations clearer and the procedures more sensible and clear for individuals who are organizing investments and for the financiers who are spending, more individuals have actually been willing and able to place initiative and money right into the process to discover great jobs and develop them, and after that extra financiers have agreed to spend their cash and take the danger and utilize the cash to create the tasks that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS recognizes that and are attempting to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are my explanation relaxing their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they are ready to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The local center part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was passed in 1992, and since then that program has been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The process takes a good while to function up a job and afterwards to get the capitalists accepted. And they do not desire their cash moving via till they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is already discouraging the advancement of projects.

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I would certainly such as to clarify that the Regional Center Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 legislation that belongs to the code. It just is a truth that the majority of the regional centers that are merging investments have actually established those instead of high unemployment or in backwoods where half- million-dollar financial investments are enabled, and that makes good sense.