About Eb5 Regional Center Program

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The program is put in a very strange and non-helpful governmental area for the stimulation of international investment in the United States. We are giving away too much for also small of an investment.


The regional facilities, with their half-million plans, essentially damaged the much more sensible million-dollar component of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them in all, as they perform in Australia, should have to do with developing organization entities, not passive financial investments. It ought to have to do with creating genuine work, not specify computations about the indirect development of jobs, which is now part of the regulations.


Probably that is among the reasons it has actually failed time after time to get to the legislative objective of 10,000 financial 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 more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter into later if anyone is interested.


This is an agency that enjoys to state yes to candidates, but as the table in my statement reveals, USCIS officers have a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that nobody has actually spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner rejections in this program and completely reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to individuals that can not obtain them any kind of various other means and to individuals whose scheduled financial investment is actually less, according to the Federal Get, than the ordinary mean internet well worth of all American families in 2007. Allow me broaden on among my observations.


My estimate based on the investors' permit applications filed 2 years after the first financial investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million verified-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not offer the kind of data that we might use on this.


For every $100 of enhanced foreign financial investment that year, the EB program added one dime. Under a much extra unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is telling reporters that the degree of financial investment in the just-concluded year was regarding $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thanks for listening to me. I expect your remarks and inquiries. [The prepared statement of David North appears as a submission for the document.] Chairman Leahy. Thanks. Our following witness is Robert Divine. He is a shareholder of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, and Berkowitz. He is the head of the company's immigration practice group.




Divine served as Principal Advise of the USA Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 up until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and after that Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was elected, as I recognize, vice head of state of the Association to Spend in USA, the nationwide more info market association of local.


Divine, we are pleased to have you here. Please go in advance, sir. 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. Thank you for having me.


At many, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration yearly to the USA. It is not near that yet, however it is expanding and obtaining towards that. Specifically as USCIS, the agency that oversees the program, has been making the policies clearer and the procedures more reasonable and clear for the individuals that are arranging investments and for the financiers who are spending, even more people have wanted and able to put effort and cash right into the process to find great tasks and develop them, and afterwards extra financiers have actually been willing to invest their money and take the threat and make use of the money to create the tasks that is the point of the program.

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These projects do not wait about forever, and USCIS understands that and are trying to speed the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not mean that they are relaxing their examination, and, in truth, they prepare to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was mentioned


The regional facility part of the program is not. It becomes part of an appropriations bill that was enacted 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 a great while to work up a task and after that to get the investors authorized. And they do not want their money flowing via up until they have actually been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional Center Program in September is already inhibiting the development of jobs.

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I would love to make clear that the Regional Facility Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the routine EB-5 law that belongs to the code. It just is a truth that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging financial investments have actually established those instead of high unemployment or in backwoods where fifty percent- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes sense.