“ I am the son and grandson of immigrant entrepreneurs who came to this country as refugees and started from scratch,” Rodriguez told EB5 Investors Magazine from his office in Washington, D. C.“ I certainly appreciate the motivation of immigrants to provide a better life for their families.”
Rodriguez, 54, grew up the son of Cuban immigrants in the ethnic brews of Brooklyn and Miami, fitting right in as a Jew with a Hispanic name.
“ I am a Sephardic Jew, whose grandparents were Ladino-speaking Jews from Turkey,” he said. about anything else we do, there is both bipartisan dislike of the program and bipartisan support of the program, which makes it very unusual among other areas. There were a lot of things that my predecessor and now my deputy,( Alejandro) Mayorkas, did to improve the program where we’ ve been really consolidating during my time as director. The most important of those were the actual consolidation of the EB-5 function here in Washington as a very specialized unit with economists, with fraud specialists, white collar specialists, and also increasing the number of people working EB-5 cases to precisely go after the kind of issues that( reporters and others) identify.
Rodriguez returned to the Northeast to land a history degree from Brown University and his law diploma from Boston College.
By the spring of 2014, he was running an army of 19,000 with the task of processing asylum and refugee applications, immigration benefits and naturalization and visa petitions.
As if that doesn’ t keep him busy enough, Rodriguez and his wife have two children. And the patriarch complements his English with Spanish, French, Hebrew and Italian.
Rodriguez recently answered questions on C-SPAN from Jerry Markon of The Washington Post and Brian Bennett of the Los Angeles Times, saying:“ One of my favorite things about EB-5 is the fact that unlike just
“ We want to admit people who really are going to create jobs, who are going to stimulate our economy, who are not going to be bad guys and commit fraud. And that effort on the whole has been bearing fruit. We have increased the effectiveness of that unit and increased our ability to monitor the economic benefit that has been created by this program.”
Rodriguez also said in the C-SPAN interview:“ The EB-5 investors have in fact been the victims of fraud. You have an EB-5 promoter, someone here in the United States, who has been defrauding the prospective immigrant, and there have been cases on that basis. We do watch for what a regional center is really doing to promote economic development, we watch for the investment really doing what it is supposed to do, with all its mechanisms to avoid fraud.”
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