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The program is placed in an extremely weird and non-helpful bureaucratic place for the stimulation of global financial investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are handing out as well much for too small of a financial investment. Better, elevating financial backing half a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, ineffective.

The local facilities, with their half-million plans, essentially undercut the extra reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, need to be concerning producing service entities, not passive investments. It should have to do with developing genuine jobs, not clarify calculations concerning the indirect creation of jobs, which is currently part of the legislation.


Probably that is among the factors why it has failed time after time to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally awkward, and the program is also full of middlemen, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of detractions, which I will certainly get involved in later on if anybody is interested.


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

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who can not get them otherwise and to people whose planned financial investment is actually much less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my monitorings.


My quote based upon the investors' permit applications submitted 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the strong ones that continue to be and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million confirmed-- that is my quote. USCIS does not offer the kind of data that we might make use of on this.


For every $100 of boosted international investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a far more unsteady analytical base, the preliminary applications of would-be immigrant investors, USCIS is informing reporters 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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Thanks for website listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and inquiries. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like a submission for the document.] 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 offered as Chief Advice of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and afterwards Performing Replacement Director. He has actually worked thoroughly with the EB-5 program in exclusive method. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice president of the Association to Invest in United States, the nationwide sector organization of local.


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 most, if all 10,000 ports were used, it would certainly be 1 percent of the migration yearly to the USA. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and getting toward that. Especially as USCIS, the firm that looks after the program, has actually been making the regulations clearer and the processes much more reasonable and clear for individuals who are arranging investments and for the capitalists who are spending, even more individuals have been willing and able to put initiative and cash right into the procedure to find good tasks and create them, and afterwards much more investors have been willing to invest their money and take the threat and utilize the cash to produce the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not wait around permanently, and USCIS understands that and are trying to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are relaxing their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they prepare to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was pointed out

The regional center part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations costs that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been prolonged five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be long-term, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes an excellent while to develop a project and after that to get the investors accepted. And they do not want their money moving with up until they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently dissuading the growth of jobs.

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I would certainly like to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the exact same as the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 law that belongs to the code. It just is a reality that a lot of the regional centers that are pooling investments have actually set those instead of high unemployment or in country locations where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are enabled, which makes sense.