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The program is positioned in a really strange and non-helpful administrative place for the stimulation of worldwide investment in the United States. We are providing away as well much for as well little of a financial investment.


The local facilities, with their half-million plans, 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 perform in Australia, should be concerning producing company entities, not passive financial investments. It ought to have to do with developing genuine jobs, not specify computations about the indirect production of tasks, which is currently part of the regulation.


Possibly that is just one of the reasons it has actually stopped working year after year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is also filled up with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has more than its share of detractions, which I will enter later if any person is interested.


This is an agency that likes to say yes to applicants, yet as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS officers have a lot more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I assume that is something that nobody has actually truly spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal rejections in this program and completely reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who can not obtain them otherwise and to people whose planned investment is really less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my observations.


My estimate based upon the capitalists' permit applications submitted 2 years after the initial financial investment-- these are the strong ones that remain and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not offer the kind of data that we can utilize on this.


So for each $100 of increased foreign financial investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a a lot more shaky statistical base, the preliminary applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is informing reporters 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 look forward to your remarks and inquiries. [The ready declaration of David North looks like a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. 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 method team.




Divine worked as Chief Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Migration Providers from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and then Acting Deputy Director. He has actually worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was chosen, as I understand, vice head of state of the Association to Spend in USA, the national sector association of local facilities.


STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, 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, Legislator Grassley, and others.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the immigration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and getting towards that. Especially as USCIS, the firm that supervises the program, has actually been making the policies more clear and the processes extra rational and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists that are spending, even more individuals have actually agreed and able to place initiative and money right into the process to discover excellent projects and establish them, and then much more financiers have actually wanted to invest their money and take the risk and make use of the cash to produce the work that is the factor of the program.

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These projects do not linger permanently, and USCIS comprehends that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are unwinding their analysis, and, as a matter of fact, they are prepared to deny applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The local facility part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations costs that was passed in 1992, and since then that program has actually been prolonged 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The procedure takes a good while to function up a job and afterwards to obtain the capitalists authorized. And they do not want their cash flowing through till they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently discouraging the development of tasks.

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I want to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a function of the routine EB-5 EB5 Regional Center Program regulation that belongs to the code. It just is a fact that a lot of the regional facilities that are pooling investments have established those in places of high unemployment or in country locations where half- million-dollar investments are enabled, and that makes good sense.