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The program is positioned in an extremely weird and non-helpful governmental location for the stimulation of global financial investment in the United States. We are giving away too much for too little of a financial investment.


The local centers, with their half-million systems, basically undercut the much more reasonable million-dollar part of the EB-5 program. Third, such programs, if we have them whatsoever, as they perform in Australia, ought to be about producing business entities, not easy financial investments. It should have to do with producing genuine tasks, not clarify calculations concerning the indirect production of tasks, which is now part of the regulation.


Maybe that is just one of the factors why it has failed every year to reach the legal objective of 10,000 financial investment visas. Fifth, the Regional Center Program is inherently awkward, and the program is too full of middlemen, both public and personal. The program has more than its share of scandals, which I will certainly enter into later if any person is interested.


This is a firm that loves to say yes to candidates, however as the table in my testimony reveals, USCIS officers have much a lot more trouble with EB-5 applications than others. I believe that is something that nobody has actually really discussed much. EB5 Regional Center Program. There are high prices of internal denials in this program and for great reason

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Seventh, in this program visas go to people who might not get them otherwise and to individuals whose scheduled investment is actually less, according to the Federal Book, than the typical mean total assets of all American family members in 2007. Let me broaden on one of my monitorings.


My price quote based upon the investors' permit applications filed 2 years after the first financial investment-- these are the strong ones that continue to be and are accepted. This is 2009-- was that they had concerning $191 million validated-- that is my estimate. USCIS does not supply the sort of information that we could make use of on this.


So for each $100 of enhanced international investment that year, the EB program contributed one penny. Under a a lot more unsteady statistical base, the initial applications of would-be immigrant capitalists, USCIS is informing journalists that the level of investment in the just-concluded year had to do with $1.2 billion. Let us accept that.

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Thank you for listening to me. I eagerly anticipate your comments and concerns. [The prepared statement of David North shows up 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 acted as Chief Advise of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services from July 2004 until November 2006, the year in which he was Performing Supervisor, and after that Acting Deputy Director. He has worked extensively with the EB-5 program secretive method. He was chosen, as I comprehend, vice president of the Association to Buy USA, the nationwide sector organization of local facilities.


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


At a lot of, if all 10,000 slots were made use of, it would certainly be 1 percent of the immigration annually to the United States. It is not near that yet, but it is growing and getting toward that. Specifically as USCIS, the firm that oversees the program, has been making the rules more clear and the procedures a lot more sensible and clear for individuals that are arranging investments and for the investors who are investing, more people have wanted and able to place effort and cash right into the process to find great projects and develop them, and after that extra capitalists have actually agreed to invest their money and take the risk and use the cash to create the jobs that is the factor of the program.

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These tasks do not linger permanently, and USCIS recognizes that and are trying to speed the program, speed the process - EB5 Regional Center Program. That does not imply that they are unwinding their scrutiny, and, as a matter of fact, they are ready to reject applications that are not qualifying. And they do so, as was pointed out


The regional center part of the program is not. It is part of an appropriations costs that was passed in 1992, and ever since that program has actually been extended 5 times for 19 years. It is time for it to be permanent, and it requires to be done currently and not nearer to the date of expiry in September.


The process takes a good while to work up a project and after that to get the financiers accepted. And they do not want their money moving with till they have been accepted. And the specter of the expiration of this Regional check here Center Program in September is currently preventing the development of jobs.

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I wish to make clear that the Regional Center Program is not the like the half-million-dollar point. The concept of half a million or a million is a feature of the normal EB-5 law that becomes part of the code. It simply is a fact that the majority of the local facilities that are merging financial investments have actually established those instead of high joblessness or in backwoods where half- million-dollar investments are allowed, and that makes good sense.