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Initially, the program is placed in an extremely odd and non-helpful governmental location for the stimulation of global investment in the USA. Second, its range is all wrong. We are giving away excessive for as well tiny of a financial investment. Additionally, elevating equity capital fifty percent a million bucks a tranche is, to say the least, inefficient.

The local centers, with their half-million schemes, basically undercut the extra reasonable million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, need to be concerning producing company entities, not easy financial investments. It ought to have to do with producing real jobs, not elaborate estimations regarding the indirect creation of work, which is now component of the regulations.


Perhaps that is just one of the reasons it has actually stopped working year after year to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Facility Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is as well filled with intermediaries, both public and private. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will certainly get right into later on if anyone is interested.


This is an agency that likes to claim yes to applicants, but as the table in my statement shows, USCIS policemans have far more difficulty with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has actually actually discussed a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner denials in this program and forever factor

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Seventh, in this program visas most likely to people who could not get them any various other method and to individuals whose organized investment is really less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the average mean internet well worth of all American family members in 2007. Allow me expand on one of my observations.


My estimate based upon the investors' eco-friendly card applications filed 2 years after the very first investment-- these are the strong ones that remain and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million verified-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not supply the kind of data that we might use on this.


For every $100 of raised international investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a far more shaky statistical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant financiers, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thank you for paying attention to me. I look onward to 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 an investor of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the firm's immigration method team.

Divine functioned as Principal Counsel of the United States Citizenship and Migration Providers from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Director, and afterwards Acting Deputy Director. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program in exclusive technique. He was elected, as I recognize, vice president of the Association to Invest in USA, the national market organization of regional.


Divine, we are pleased to have you below. Please go on, sir. DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, get more info CALDWELL, AND BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, PURCHASE THE U.S.A. (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others. Thanks for having me.


At many, if all 10,000 ports were made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration each year to the USA. It is not near that yet, yet it is growing and getting towards that. Especially as USCIS, the agency that supervises the program, has been making the rules more clear and the procedures much more logical and clear for the individuals who are arranging financial investments and for the investors who are spending, more individuals have actually been ready and able to place initiative and money into the process to locate great projects and establish them, and after that extra investors have actually agreed to invest their cash and take the danger and utilize the money to produce the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These tasks do not linger permanently, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed the program, speed up the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are relaxing their examination, and, as a matter of fact, they are all set to deny applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed

The local center component of the program is not. It is component of an appropriations expense that was established in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be irreversible, and it needs to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiration in September.


The procedure takes an excellent while to develop a project and after that to obtain the investors authorized. And they do not want their cash streaming via until they have actually been approved. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is currently inhibiting the development of tasks.

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I want to clear up that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar thing. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 legislation that is component of the code. It simply is a truth that the majority of the local centers that are pooling investments have established those instead of high joblessness or in country locations where fifty percent- million-dollar financial investments are allowed, which makes good sense.