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First, the program is placed in an extremely strange and non-helpful bureaucratic place for the stimulation of international financial investment in the United States. Second, its range is all incorrect. We are distributing way too much for as well little of an investment. Even more, raising financial backing half a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, ineffective.


The local centers, with their half-million systems, basically undercut the much more sensible million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they do in Australia, should be about creating company entities, not passive investments. It needs to have to do with producing genuine jobs, not specify estimations regarding the indirect creation of jobs, which is now component of the regulations.


Possibly that is one of the reasons it has actually failed every year to get to the legal goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally awkward, and the program is also full of intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of detractions, which I will certainly enter later if anybody is interested.


This is a firm that loves to say yes to candidates, however as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS police officers have a lot more problem with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that no one has actually really discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal denials in this program and permanently reason

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to individuals who could not get them otherwise and to individuals whose planned investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the average mean web well worth of all American households in 2007. Let me expand on one of my observations.


My estimate based on the financiers' permit applications filed 2 years after the first financial investment-- these are the strong ones that stay and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had regarding $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not provide the kind of information that we might use on this.


So for every $100 of increased international investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a far more shaky analytical base, the preliminary applications of prospective immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the degree of investment in the just-concluded year was regarding $1.2 billion. Let us approve that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I anticipate your comments and concerns. [The prepared declaration of David North looks like a submission for the record.] Chairman Leahy. Thank you. 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 practice team.




Divine acted as Principal Advise of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Providers from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Acting Director, and afterwards Acting Deputy Director. He has actually functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program in personal technique. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice head of state of the Association to Spend in U.S.A., the national market organization of local facilities.


Divine, we are delighted to have you below. Please go ahead, sir. STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Grassley, and others. Thank you for visit their website having me.


At the majority of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would be 1 percent of the migration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and obtaining toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the firm that manages the program, has been making the guidelines more clear and the procedures a lot more sensible and clear for individuals who are organizing financial investments and for the capitalists who are spending, even more people have actually informative post wanted and able to place effort and money into the process to find excellent tasks and create them, and afterwards more financiers have agreed to spend their money and take the risk and make use of the cash to create the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not linger 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 indicate that they are relaxing their scrutiny, and, actually, they prepare 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 is component of an appropriations expense that was passed in 1992, and given that 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 day of expiry in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to work up a project and after that to get the financiers approved. And they do not desire their cash moving through up until they have been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Facility Program in September is already dissuading the advancement of projects.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 regulation that becomes part of the code. It simply is a truth that the majority of the local centers that image source are pooling investments have established those instead of high joblessness or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are permitted, which makes feeling.