“ 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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