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The program is put in a very weird and non-helpful bureaucratic location for the excitement of worldwide financial investment in the United States. We are offering away too much for as well small of an investment.


The regional centers, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the more reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in any way, as they carry out in Australia, should have to do with developing business entities, not easy financial investments. It needs to have to do with producing actual work, not clarify estimations regarding the indirect development of tasks, which is currently part of the regulations.


Maybe that is just one of the reasons it has actually stopped working every 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 as well full of intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will get involved in later if anyone is interested.


This is a firm that enjoys to state yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS officers have a lot more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that no one has truly chatted around much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of inner denials in this program and for good factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals that could not get them otherwise and to people whose scheduled financial investment is actually much less, according to the Federal Book, than the ordinary mean total assets of all American families in 2007. Let me expand on one of my monitorings.


My price quote based upon the financiers' copyright applications filed 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the strong ones that continue to be and are authorized. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million verified-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not supply the sort of information that we can utilize on this.


For every $100 of enhanced foreign investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a much a lot more unsteady analytical base, the initial applications of potential immigrant capitalists, USCIS is click here telling journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Allow us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I expect your comments and questions. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry 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 immigration technique group.




Divine functioned as Chief Advice of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Supervisor, and after that Acting Deputy Director. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive practice. He was elected, as I understand, vice president of the Association to Spend in U.S.A., the nationwide market association of local facilities.


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


At most, if all 10,000 slots were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is expanding and getting towards that. Particularly as USCIS, the firm that manages the program, has been making the rules more clear and the processes more rational and clear for individuals who are arranging financial investments and for the capitalists that are spending, more individuals have actually been willing and able to place effort and cash into the procedure to find good jobs and establish them, and after that much more financiers have wanted to invest their cash and take the danger and use the money to produce the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These tasks do not wait around for life, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed up the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not suggest that they are relaxing their analysis, and, in truth, they are prepared to reject applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional facility component of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations costs that was passed in 1992, and because then that program has actually been prolonged five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiry in September.


The procedure takes a great while to work up a job and after that to obtain the investors authorized. And they do not want their cash moving through till they have actually been authorized. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Center Program in September is currently dissuading the growth of projects.

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I want to make clear 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 function of the regular EB-5 legislation that belongs to the code. It simply is a fact that most of the regional centers that are pooling financial investments have set those in places of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar financial investments are enabled, and that makes feeling.