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The program is placed in a very weird and non-helpful bureaucratic area for the excitement of international investment in the United States. Second, its scale is all wrong. We are distributing way too much for also small of a financial investment. Better, raising equity capital half a million dollars a tranche is, to state the least, ineffective.


The local centers, with their half-million plans, basically undercut the a lot more practical million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they carry out in Australia, must have to do with developing business entities, not easy financial investments. It needs to have to do with producing real jobs, not clarify calculations regarding the indirect production of jobs, which is now part of the legislation.


Perhaps that is just one of the reasons it has fallen short every year to reach the legal goal of 10,000 investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is naturally clumsy, and the program is too loaded with intermediaries, both public and personal. The program has greater than its share of scandals, which I will obtain into later if any person is interested.


This is an agency that likes to say yes to candidates, yet as the table in my testimony shows, USCIS policemans have a lot a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I think that is something that no one has really spoken about a lot. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high rates of inner rejections in this program and for good factor

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who could not obtain them differently and to individuals whose planned investment is actually much less, according to the Federal Reserve, than the typical mean total assets of all American households in 2007. Let me expand on among my monitorings.


My estimate based on the capitalists' permit applications filed 2 years after the initial investment-- these are the solid ones that continue to be and are approved. This is 2009-- was that they had about $191 million confirmed-- that is my price quote. USCIS does not supply the kind of data that we could use on this.


For every $100 of raised foreign investment that year, the EB program contributed one cent. Under a far more unsteady statistical base, the preliminary applications of potential immigrant investors, USCIS is informing journalists 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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Thanks for paying attention to me. I expect your remarks and questions. [The prepared statement of David North looks like an entry 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 method team.




Divine served as Principal Advise of the USA Citizenship and Migration Services from July 2004 till November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and then Acting Replacement Supervisor. He has actually functioned thoroughly with the EB-5 program secretive technique. He was elected, as I comprehend, vice president of the Association to Purchase U.S.A., the nationwide market association of regional centers.


DECLARATION OF ROBERT C. DIVINE, LAWYER, BAKER, DONELSON, BEARMAN, CALDWELL, AND Check Out Your URL BERKOWITZ, P.C., CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, AND VICE PRESIDENT, INVEST IN THE USA (IIUSA) Mr. Divine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Legislator Grassley, and others.


At a lot of, if all 10,000 ports were utilized, it would be 1 percent of the migration every year to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and obtaining toward that. Especially as USCIS, the company that oversees the program, has been making the rules clearer and the processes more rational and clear for the people that are organizing investments and for the financiers who are investing, more people have been eager and able to place initiative and money right into the process to locate excellent projects and develop them, and after that more financiers have actually agreed to invest their money and take the danger and use the cash to develop the jobs that is the point of the program.

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These jobs do not wait around for life, and USCIS understands that and are attempting to speed up the program, speed the procedure - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not indicate that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, actually, they are ready to refute applications that are not certifying. And they do so, as was discussed


The regional center part of the program is not. It belongs to an appropriations bill that was established in 1992, and since then that program has actually been prolonged five times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it needs to be done now and not nearer to the day of expiration in September.


The process takes an excellent while to develop a project and after that to obtain the financiers approved. And they do not desire their money streaming via up until they have been approved. And the specter of the expiry of this Regional Facility Program in September is currently inhibiting my site the growth of jobs.

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I would like to clarify that the Regional Facility Program is not the very same as the half-million-dollar point. The idea of half a million or a million is a feature of the regular EB-5 regulation that belongs to the code. It just is a truth that the majority of the regional facilities that are merging investments have actually set those in places of high unemployment or in backwoods where half- million-dollar useful content financial investments are allowed, and that makes sense.